Build Tools for iOS

You have to admin that it doesn't happen too often :D

The site is a periodical. The linked post is one article from the periodical. I get in it my inbox, it's always interesting.

I subscribe to this and NSHipster. What other Obj-C resources do you follow?

Travis CI (for now) is stuck on iOS 6, so you're out of luck if you're targeting 7. They expect to resolve this soon. You must also subscribe to a paid plan if you want Travis to build your private repo. That said, I use Travis for all of my iOS 6-compatible public cocoapods on Github.

Xcode 5's built-in Xcode bots require OS X Mavericks Server ($20) and, in my experience, has a very brittle setup if you're using Cocoapods. It's probably fine for simpler projects.

I've personally been running Jenkins locally. My build script:

  - Downloads provisioning profiles from Apple's dev center using Cupertino[0]
  - Builds and codesigns my app using Xctool[1]
  - Archives the app with xcrun
  - Builds my app again with the Testflight library, then uploads the result to TF

[0] https://github.com/nomad/cupertino

[1] https://github.com/facebook/xctool -- the only Facebook product I use!

Edit: Jenkins has an Xcode plugin, though I don't use it (I use xctool instead). I do use Jenkins' Testflight plugin, which makes it very easy to upload your build to testflight and include the build's changelog in your release notes.

I second the advice to go with a 3rd-party CI (although I am partial to TeamCity).

This is especially because Apple's xcodebuild got way better in this release. It's the underlying deployment system behind the new CI, and in addition it can deploy things to devices now and handle all sorts of neat things that not even the best 3rd-party tools could do before. So:

> Unfortunately, xcodebuild doesn’t properly support test targets and application tests for iOS.

This is out of date, and if xcodebuild has given you problems in the past you should try it again.

One of things that becomes evident when looking at the CI Bots is how inflexible it is. From what I gather pre/post built steps require baking them into your Xcode project for example. It just seems like it was developed for very simple projects being developed by a small team with little to no external dependencies.

I wonder if people building these tools have any experience building large scale iOS apps. Maybe they do, and developing for that case wasn't their objective.

FYI, there are a few problems with getting Cocoapods to work with Xcode's CI. I think there are a few who have managed to find out workarounds, but it requires some tinkering around at the moment.

https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/1492

Personally I just set up jenkins.