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Sign APK without exposing keystore password

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You can define the signing configuration to sign the apk in the build.gradle file using these properties:

In many case you may need to avoid this kind of info in the build.gradle file.

Method A: Configure release signing using a keystore.properties file

It’s possible to configure your app’s build.gradle so that it will read your signing configuration information from a properties file like keystore.properties.

Setting up signing like this is beneficial because:

First, create a file called keystore.properties in the root of your project with content like this (replacing the values with your own): 

storeFile=keystore.jks
storePassword=storePassword
keyAlias=keyAlias
keyPassword=keyPassword

Now, in your app’s build.gradle file, set up the signingConfigs block as follows: 

android {
...

signingConfigs { release { def propsFile = rootProject.file(‘keystore.properties’) if (propsFile.exists()) { def props = new Properties() props.load(new FileInputStream(propsFile)) storeFile = file(props[‘storeFile’]) storePassword = props[‘storePassword’] keyAlias = props[‘keyAlias’] keyPassword = props[‘keyPassword’] } } } 

}

That’s really all there is to it, but don’t forget to exclude both your keystore file and your keystore.properties file from version control.

A couple of things to note:

Method B: By using an environment variable

The same can be achieved also without a properties file, making the password harder to find: 

android {

  signingConfigs {
    release {
        storeFile file('/your/keystore/location/key')
        keyAlias 'your_alias'
        String ps = System.getenv("ps")
        if (ps == null) {
             throw new GradleException('missing ps env variable')
        }
        keyPassword ps
        storePassword ps
    }
}

The "ps" environment variable can be global, but a safer approach can be by adding it to the shell of Android Studio only. In linux this can be done by editing Android Studio’s Desktop Entry 

Exec=sh -c "export ps=myPassword123 ; /path/to/studio.sh"

You can find more details in this topic.

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Gradle:
* Gradle for Android
* A basic build.gradle file
* Define and use Build Configuration Fields
* Centralizing dependencies via dependencies.gradle file
* Sign APK without exposing keystore password
* Adding product flavor-specific dependencies
* Specifying different application IDs for build types and product flavors
* Versioning your builds via version.properties file
* Defining product flavors
* Changing output apk name and add version name
* Adding product flavor-specific resources
* Why are there two build.gradle files in an Android Studio project
* Directory structure for flavor-specific resources
* Enable Proguard using gradle
* Ignoring build variant
* Seeing dependency tree
* Enable experimental NDK plugin support for Gradle and AndroidStudio
* Display signing information
* Executing a shell script from gradle
* Show all gradle project tasks
* Delete unaligned apk automatically
* Disable image compression for a smaller APK file size
* Debugging your Gradle errors
* Use gradle.properties for central versionnumberbuildconfigurations
* Defining build types
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