fastlane/nightly

The fastlane/nightly repository automatically publishes nightly "beta" versions of Ruby packages (called gems) to RubyGems.org, the public library hosting service for Ruby. The main benefit is that users can try out your latest changes every single day without you having to manually cut a release. You set it up by providing a couple of configuration values, like the name of your package and a private API key for your RubyGems account. You can also optionally configure where the code lives and add a Slack webhook so your team gets a notification whenever a new nightly build goes out. You put all of this on a server, the README mentions Heroku as one example, and schedule it to run a single command every night. That command grabs your latest code, bumps the version with a special tag to mark it as a nightly build, and uploads it. This is useful for any open-source Ruby project that wants to let early adopters test new features before an official release. The fastlane team uses it for their own tool, but it works with any Ruby gem. For example, if you maintain a Ruby library and are working on a big new feature across several weeks, your testers could pull the latest nightly build each morning to see what changed, rather than waiting for you to manually package and publish a stable release. The project is essentially a single automation script, written in Ruby using a tool called Rake. It is deliberately simple and hands-off once configured. One thing to note: even though the script runs automatically on a server, the README explains that code changes to this repository itself are not deployed automatically. If you contribute a change to the script, you need to manually notify a member of the fastlane core team so they can deploy it themselves.