Ship — Overview

Ship is the release runbook for a reflutter app. Invoked as /reflutter:ship, it drives a staged rollout from a ready main to verified artifacts in internal testing: building, checking, and interpreting along the way, and stopping at every point where the decision is yours.

It is user-invoked only. A release is deliberate and irreversible, so nothing starts one on your behalf.

When to reach for it

Two things must be true:

1. There is something on main worth shipping — committed, pushed, with changelog entries to show for it.
2. The app is on the train: it has a fastlane/Pluginfile wired to fastlane-plugin-flutter_deploy and a reflutter.json with a release block. Every per-app fact (lane names, flavors, app ids) comes from that file — the runbook itself is app-agnostic.

Not on the train yet? One skill onboards an app. /reflutter:instrumenting-release-lanes scaffolds the fastlane setup, writes the release block, and proves the wiring with a dry run of every lane, without ever running anything live. See The skills.

What it will and won’t do

It will:

• Run analysis and tests.
• Prove your env values are current.
• Bump the version and cut the release candidate.
• Build both artifacts and verify their freshness.
• Interpret any failure into an exact next action.

It will never:

• Upload on its own initiative. Every upload happens behind your explicit, per-upload approval.
• Accept an Apple agreement or touch your certificates. Those are legal acts, and they are yours.
• Advance a gate. On-device verification, copy approval, and console actions are passed by your words, never by inference.

The reasoning behind those three “never” lines has its own page: Release Interlocks.

The shape of a release

Step	Who acts	What happens
prepare	Lane	Bump, cut rc/X.Y.Z, build. Dry run, then your go.
store-notes	You	Drafted for you, approved by you.
upload	Lane	To internal testing, behind per-upload approval.
verify	You	On your device. Asked, never assumed.
promote	Lane	Same source, same build number, to production.
finalize	Lane	Tag X.Y.Z, drop the RC scaffolding, after integrity checks.

Two pages go deeper:

• Running a release is the full walkthrough, gate by gate.
• The release model is the doctrine underneath: why the candidate is frozen source, why the build number never changes, and why finalize is the dangerous step. Read it once before your first train; everything else can be learned by doing.