In the story we will see how to create a workflow for Android Lint using GitHub Actions.

Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash

Before moving to the workflow I want to quickly go over GitHub Actions and Android Lint.

Github Actions

During Android or any development you might have come across different CI/CD frameworks that you can use to automate the processes or delivery pipelines e.g build, test and distribute. GitHub Actions provides a convenient way to create your workflows and automate your process right from your repository.

Some of the benefits that I see while working in GitHub Actions

• Github Actions are attached to your repository in Github, you don’t need to manage an extra third party platform to build and manage your CI/CD. Your code is in GitHub, your CI/CD is in GitHub.
• Github Actions give more controls to developers minimising the need of having a separate DevOps team to manage CI/CD.
• While creating workflows using GitHub Actions, It provides startup workflows to choose from for quick start, e.g for Android there is Android CI workflow already provided for quick help.
• Github Marketplace where almost 20K actions are already available to use which you can choose and Add/Modify into your repository right away.
• Github Actions are customisable you can achieve almost everything you want to automate.

To Read more about Github Actions, follow the the official documentations from the link.

Android Lint

We write and build Tests to make sure functional requirements are met properly but It’s also equally important to inspect your code to identify structural problems in the code. lint tool helps in identifying structural and static issues in the code which can impact efficiency and reliability of the code and possible optimisation to improve code security, correctness, performance, usability etc

Android Studio provides a built-in lint tool which runs when you build your App but you can also manually execute it using Code —> Inspect Code option in Android Studio or also using command line ./gradlew lint .