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Quick start

Let's discover ShipThis in less than 5 minutes.

ShipThis is a command-line tool which manages building and uploading your Godot mobile games to the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Free while in open beta

ShipThis is free to use while it is in open beta, and it will always be free for most solo devs. See pricing for what is planned.

What you'll need​

No account needed up front

You only need a Play Console or Apple Developer account to publish to the stores. You can build an APK, AAB or IPA without either of them.

Your ShipThis account is created the first time you run shipthis login - a one-time passcode to your email, no password and no card.

Create your account here and come back to the steps when you are ready.

1. Install ShipThis​

ShipThis can be installed as a package via the NPM package manager. Run the following at the command line:

npm install -g shipthis

2. Create an account​

At the same command line, run the shipthis login command, it will create an account for you if one does not exist.

shipthis login

3. Set up your game​

Next, run the wizard command to configure your game on ShipThis. The command takes a platform parameter - this can be either android or ios.

The wizard creates the credentials your game needs to be signed and published, and saves them against your game. You only need to run it once per platform.

tip

The shipthis game wizard command should be run from a directory which contains a project.godot file.

Set up an Android game​

shipthis game wizard android

The wizard will create an Android keystore, connect your Google account, and set up a Google Cloud Project, Service Account and API Key so ShipThis can upload to Google Play. It walks you through each of the Android set up steps.

Set up an iOS game​

shipthis game wizard ios

The wizard will connect ShipThis to your Apple Developer account and create the API Key, distribution certificate and provisioning profile your game needs. It walks you through each of the iOS set up steps.

note

The wizard talks to Google and Apple on your behalf, so it can fail for reasons outside ShipThis - an expired agreement, or a Google Cloud quota. The Troubleshooting guide covers the ones we see most often.

4. Ship!​

Now you can publish new versions your game to TestFlight or Google Play with the shipthis game ship command:

shipthis game ship

asciicast

What's next?​

Your first build takes a few minutes. While it runs:

Then:

FAQ​

How much does it cost?

ShipThis is free while it is in open beta, and it will always be free for most solo devs.

See the pricing page for what is planned after the beta.

Do I need a Mac to build for iOS?

No. Your game is compiled on the ShipThis cloud build servers, so you do not need an Apple computer, Xcode or the Android SDK. The CLI runs on Windows, macOS and Linux - there is even a guide to building for iOS from an Android device using Termux.

You will still need an Apple Developer account to publish to the App Store, because that is Apple's requirement rather than ours.

Which versions of Godot are supported?

All stable Godot versions since 3.6.

ShipThis reads your project.godot file to work out which version you used, and builds with the latest stable patch release of it. See Godot versioning for the full table, and for how to pin a specific version.

Can I ship a C# game?

Yes - for both iOS and Android, on Godot 3.6 or Godot 4.3 and later.

Godot 3.6 uses Mono and Godot 4 uses .NET. For Godot 4, develop with the .NET version of the Godot editor. You do not need the Android or iOS toolchains on your own machine - ShipThis provides the build environment.

Can I get a build without an Apple or Google account?

Yes. Add --useDemoCredentials and ShipThis signs the build with its own certificates and keystore, so you get an APK, AAB or IPA you can install yourself without setting up a developer account first.

See the game ship reference for the commands, and run the wizard later when you are ready to publish.