About Fastlane
fastlane is a command line tool for iOS and Android developers that automates the repetitive parts of shipping a mobile app. Typical jobs include generating screenshots, dealing with provisioning profiles and code signing, building the app and releasing it to the stores or to testers, all scripted so that a release becomes one repeatable command.
It is written in Ruby and organized around lanes that chain together reusable actions, which you can run on a laptop or on a CI server. The project documentation lives at docs.fastlane.tools. When something goes wrong, the maintainers ask users to include the output of the fastlane env command in bug reports, and to label regressions so they can be tracked quickly.
fastlane is MIT licensed and maintained by a small core team with help from many contributors. It is open-source tooling you run yourself, so there is no hosted service involved. Mobile teams use it to cut manual release work and keep builds consistent between developers and CI.
Key features
- Automates iOS and Android build and release steps
- Screenshot generation for store listings
- Provisioning profile and code signing handling
- Reusable lanes and actions in Ruby
- Runs locally or on CI servers
- Environment report command for debugging
Good fit for
- →Automating App Store and Play Store releases
- →Standardizing mobile builds across a team
- →Generating localized store screenshots
- Built with
- Ruby
- Tags
- mobile
- ios
- android
- release-automation
- ci-cd
- ruby
- app-store
- deployment
Fastlane: questions and answers
- What is Fastlane used for?
- Fastlane is a Ruby-based tool for iOS and Android developers that automates tedious release tasks such as screenshots, code signing profiles, building and publishing apps. It is a good fit for automating App Store and Play Store releases, standardizing mobile builds across a team, and generating localized store screenshots.
- Is Fastlane open source?
- Yes. Fastlane is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at fastlane/fastlane and is written mainly in Ruby.
- Is Fastlane free?
- Yes. Fastlane is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- What is Fastlane an alternative to?
- Fastlane is an open-source alternative to Bitrise, Codemagic, Appcircle and Expo EAS. Other open-source alternatives to Bitrise include Jenkins.
- Is Fastlane actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Fastlane was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is 2.240.1, published on 15 September 2026. The project has 42k stars on GitHub.
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