Distributing Builds

Successful Deployment

You have now been able to create and deploy builds successfully. According to your pipeline, your build has been deployed. To get files for your build you can click on the “Amazon S3” link.

You should be able to see a zip containing your build inside the project folder.

Distributing Builds

There are a number of ways you can deliver builds to your team from here. In general, you would want to keep these deployment buckets private so they are only available to your team. At the same time, granting permissions to your team to access these files might also not be desirable as your wider team perhaps should not have login access to your cloud infrastructure. External testers certainly would not need access to your AWS account, even with limited permissions.

The simplest way to distribute builds to external users is to generate a short-lived, pre-signed URL which allows members of your team to download the zip.

To do this, select the zip, click on the “Actions” drop-down menu, and then click on the “Share as pre-signed URL” option.

This will bring up another set of options which allows you to specify the duration for which the URL will be active for. Remember that if the URL expires, you will have to generate another link for your team manually.

Click on the “Create presigned URL” button. This will copy the URL to your clipboard so you will then need to paste the URL somewhere in order to share it with your team.

Other Distribution Methods

Ideally, a fully realized CI/CD pipeline would be able to automatically deploy to whatever platform(s) you are testing on, or in the case of testers and team members getting builds directly you could have this system automatically generate pre signed URLs and email them out.

We will not cover this in this tutorial, but we might look at this in another guide in future.

You can easily set these systems up yourself using S3 event notifications. The idea would be to create an event which is triggered when a new object is written to the bucket. This event would execute a Lambda Function where you could generate the URL programmatically. You could then decide how you wish to forward that onto team members. You could integrate something like Slack webhooks so that everyone in a given Slack channel can see the URL, or you could use an email service like AWS SES to send a batch of emails out with the build URL.