Learning and Understanding the Xcode Build System

Question

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

Answer 1

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.