Release: grunt-xcode v2

01 Oct 2014

complete rewrite + new features: grunt-xcode

I started building the initial version of grunt-xcode around November last year. The primary reason for the project was that I was getting tired of manually having to do iOS builds for our clients - it needed to be a part of our Grunt build task.

I stumbled upon shenzhen which actually worked fairly well for me as a command-line tool, so I thought “hey let me just wrap this in JS”. That was probably not the wisest decision, but grunt-xcode v1 ended up sort of working for us (not so much for everybody else).

To be honest the code was quite ugly and I didn’t like the dependency on a RubyGem - it just didn’t feel right. I also started getting some bug reports on GitHub and email.

Rewrite

The primary goal of the rewrite was to remove the dependency on shenzhen and use the built-in xcodebuild tool instead.

Features:

remove dependency on shenzhen
added support for all parameters available in xcodebuild
show progress indicators for archiving and export tasks
show stdout if Grunt is run with the --verbose flag

grunt-xcode build

Usage

I’m actively using grunt-xcode for a client project and it’s been working out great for me.

Installing grunt-xcode is just as simple as any other npm module:

$ npm install grunt-xcode --save-dev

require('load-grunt-tasks')(grunt);

grunt.initConfig({
    xcode: {
        options: {
          project: '/path/to/my/awesome/App/App.xcodeproj',
          scheme: 'Release'
        }
    }
});

grunt.registerTask('default', ['xcode']);

For a list of all options please refer to the README.

Hopefully the codebase is a lot more readable now, that was at least the goal.

Please do let me know if you run into any issues with grunt-xcode, I’m sure there are multiple cases I haven’t tested properly.