Better way of incrementing build number?

Question

I have been using a shell script as part of my Xcode build process to increment the build number within the plist file, however it's making Xcode 4.2.1 crash frequently (with an error about the target not belonging to a project; I'm guessing the changing of the plist file is confusing Xcode in some way).

The shell script did this so that the build number is only incremented by agvtool when a file is newer than the plist file (so just building didn't increment the value):

if [ -n \"`find ProjDir -newer ProjDir/Project-Info.plist`\" ]; then agvtool -noscm next-version -all; else echo \"Version not incremented\"; fi

Is there a way to increment the build number (in the plist file, or anywhere else) that doesn't break Xcode?

FINAL EDIT: I now do this kind of stuff using a python script which I have just made public on github. It's not well documented but shouldn't be difficult to work out. As a bonus this repo also contains a useful script to automatically bundle 3rd party library into an app bundle.

Answer 1

I've messed around with a lot of the answers on this question, and none of them quite satisfied me. However, I finally came up with a mixture that I really like!

We simply set the version number for the built product to the number of Git commits. This won't mess with your source control, since the script only mutates the built product.

Add this "Run Script" build phase to the end of your build phases:

if [ "${CONFIGURATION}" = "Release" ]; then
    buildNumber=$(git rev-list --count head)
    /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set :CFBundleVersion $buildNumber" "${TARGET_BUILD_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_PATH}"
fi

Set your Info.plist version in your project to whatever you want, it will never get used when building a release build. I set mine to AUTOMATED or DEVELOPMENT so it's clear when I'm running a development build.

That's it! The built app will have a constantly increasing build number. (As long as you always do your builds off the same branch.)

Why I like this method:

• Easy
• Doesn't pollute Git version history
• CFBundleVersion is totally automatic
• The pretty version number can be modified whenever I want

Other notes:

• If you have app extensions in your project, simply set the same build script on those targets too. This will keep all the version numbers automated and in sync. The App Store requires extension versions match your main app.