how to capture CLI output for specific variable in firebase app distribution CLI

The testing_uri is not exposed as an environment variable for the firebase app distribution. Like you mentioned, you will need to parse the output with regex to obtain the desired uri. I can help with a bash script that will execute the firebase appdistribution:distribute and export the TESTING_URI to an environment variable.

#!/bin/bash

# Run the Firebase App Distribution command
output=$(firebase appdistribution:distribute <your-app-path> --app <your-app-id> --token <your-token>)

# Use regex to find the testing URI in the output
uri=$(echo "$output" | grep -oE "https://appdistribution\.firebase\.google\.com/testerapps/[a-zA-Z0-9]+")

# Check if the URI pattern as described above was matched
if [ -n "$uri" ]; then
    echo "Testing URI found: $uri"
    # Export the URI as an environment variable
    export TESTING_URI="$uri"
    echo "TESTING_URI is now set as an environment variable"
else
    echo "Testing URI not found in the output"
fi

Save the bash script above with a name of your choice ending in .sh. You can name it get_firebase_testing_uri.sh.

Make the script executable with the command below:

chmod +x get_firebase_testing_uri.sh

Run the bash script with the command below:

./get_firebase_testing_uri.sh

Obtain the exported environment variable with echo as shown below:

echo $TESTING_URI

I hope this works!

Firebase CLI takes -j, --json option to format output in JSON rather than text.

Other options and commands can be listed with firebase --help.