Learning and Understanding the Xcode Build System

xcode build automation target
gks picture gks · Mar 30, 2011 · Viewed 9.3k times · Source

Alright, I'm curious about the build process with Xcode. Setting up multiple Targets, how to automate versioning and generally understanding the system so I can manipulate it to do what I want.

Does anyone have any books or can point me to some documentation somewhere so that I can figure all of this out?

Thanks a ton.

Another thing, if anyone actually sees this since changing it.

But any books anyone is aware of that will focus on Xcode 4? There's Xcode 3 Unleashed but I'd be real curious if there are any books that focus heavily on Xcode 4.

Answer

the_mandrill picture the_mandrill · Mar 31, 2011

One thing that is really essential for consistent, reproducible, automatable builds is knowledge of the xcodebuild command. Sadly I can't find any official docs on it apart from the manpage (type man xcodebuild). There's a useful guide to automating iphone builds here that includes building with xcodebuild and versioning with agvtool. This is just as relevant to general building of Mac apps.

Generally building with xcodebuild is very simple: 

cd project_dir
xcodebuild -project myproject.xcodeproj -configuration Release ARCHS="x86_64 i386" build

Once you can build from a script like this it's very easy to slot into an automated build system.

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