Mobile Tophatting Process

5 posts · Jun 2015 – Aug 2024

What this trail covers

Shopify has developed and enhanced its mobile release process with the introduction of Tophat, a desktop macOS application that streamlines the tophatting of mobile changes. Tophat provides a seamless and interactive experience for testing pull requests on real devices or simulators without requiring local compilation. It integrates with CI pipelines to provide links to build artifacts, and includes a 'Quick Launch' feature for developers to easily grab the latest native builds. For iOS, Tophat leverages the `ios-deploy` utility and Fastlane's `match` for signing, enabling installation and debugging on real devices. The tool also supports attaching to local Metro bundlers for faster iteration on JavaScript changes.

All Shopify trails

Aug 2024Tophat: Crafting a Delightful Mobile Developer Experience - ShopifyThis post details the evolution of Shopify's mobile tophatting process, introducing the desktop macOS application 'Tophat'. It highlights the challenges of testing mobile changes, especially during the React Native migration, and the limitations of previous tools. The new Tophat app integrates with CI pipelines to provide direct links to build artifacts stored in GCS, eliminating local compilation. For iOS, it addresses the lack of a direct `adb` equivalent by bundling `ios-deploy` and simplifying signing by integrating with Fastlane's `match` utility for development certificates. The 'Quick Launch' feature is also introduced for faster iteration on JavaScript changes with updated native builds.
Sep 2020Tophatting in React Native - ShopifyThis post details the development of a tool for tophatting React Native apps. The tool stores JavaScript bundles in cloud storage, allowing developers to download them quickly instead of rebuilding the entire app. A backend service is used to manage bundle metadata and abstract third-party service interactions. The workflow involves scanning a QR code or using a bundle ID to load the new JavaScript bundle, enabling faster and more convenient peer code review.
Aug 2020Building Reliable Mobile Applications - ShopifyThis post details the challenges of mobile app releases due to app store review times and merchant update adoption. It outlines Shopify's strategies for improving reliability through extensive automated testing (unit, integration, functional, UI snapshot), manual testing for complex features, and code reviews with component ownership enforced by Code Owners. A key enhancement is the automation of the 'tophatting' process for pull requests using `dev android tophat <pull-request-url>` and `dev ios tophat <pull-request-url>`. The release process has evolved from ad-hoc to a weekly release train model, supported by Release Captains and the ShipIt Mobile automation tool. Staged rollouts and server-side beta flags are used to mitigate the impact of bugs. Automated monitoring with Datadog's Anomaly Detection and a rotating on-call schedule (Retail ATC) are in place for outage handling.
May 2019Mobile Release Engineering at Scale with Shipit Mobile - ShopifyThis post details the development of Shipit Mobile, a platform to create, view, and manage app releases for Shopify's mobile applications. It addresses the manual and error-prone nature of previous mobile release processes by introducing automation for build number incrementing, CI execution, testing, and distribution to app stores (Google Play and App Store via Fastlane). The system uses a trunk-based development branching model, defines distribution channels, and aims to make the release captain role transferable through guided workflows and Slack notifications. It also includes mechanisms for emergency releases and emphasizes the importance of a scalable CI system for mobile.
Sep 2018Mobile Tophatting at Shopify - ShopifyThis post details the creation of a frictionless tophatting process for mobile developers at Shopify. It describes how to skip the compilation step by exporting application binaries from CI builds and making them available via the CI API. The process is integrated with GitHub commit statuses and uses an internal CLI tool called 'dev' to select and install the correct app binary onto simulators (iOS) or emulators (Android). The tool handles authentication with Buildkite and GitHub APIs, retrieves build URLs, filters valid artifacts, and launches the selected simulator/emulator before installing and launching the app. Future improvements include caching artifacts, supporting real devices, and simplifying input for tophatting from commits and branches.
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Jun 2015Introducing Shipit - ShopifyThis post introduces Shipit, an open-source deployment tool developed at Shopify. It addresses the challenges of coordinating frequent deployments in a large development team by providing features such as deployment locking, easy project configuration via `shipit.yml`, synchronization mechanisms, an audit trail of deployments, and performance improvements by leveraging GitHub webhooks. It also supports pre-deployment checks like displaying key metrics and checklists, and visualizing deployment progress.