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Closed tracks & testers

A closed track gates a build to an explicit audience — a QA team, an external beta cohort. gplay creates the track and declares who can test it.

Create a closed track

Section titled “Create a closed track”
Terminal window
gplay tracks create qa-team

Closed testing is the only track type the API can create, so there is no --type flag. The new track is a phone (default form factor) track. Creating a track that already exists surfaces the API error (exit 30) — gplay doesn't fake idempotency.

Declare the testers

Section titled “Declare the testers”

The Play API expresses a track's audience only as Google Groups — individual emails are a Play Console-only gesture:

Terminal window
gplay testers set --track qa-team --group qa@googlegroups.com
gplay testers list --track qa-team

testers set is declarative: it replaces the whole group list (it maps 1:1 to the API's testers.update). There is no add/remove — re-run set with the full desired list. Idempotent by design, which is exactly what CI and agents want.

Two safety rails:

  • A bare set with neither --group nor --clear is refused (exit 2) — a forgotten --group can never silently wipe the audience.
  • Emptying the list on purpose is the explicit --clear.

There is no --confirm here: a closed test track is low-stakes and reversible, unlike a production rollout.

Ship a build to the track

Section titled “Ship a build to the track”
Terminal window
gplay releases upload app.aab --track qa-team
gplay releases promote --from internal --to qa-team

--track accepts any name. If the track doesn't exist yet, the upload fails with a hint pointing at gplay tracks create — gplay never auto-creates a track from a typo.

Rehearse first

Section titled “Rehearse first”

Both writes accept --dry-run (validate + preview the payload, no HTTP call) and --keep-edit-on-failure for debugging the underlying Edit.

Section titled “Related”