Per-environment configuration for Xcode, using configurations.
DIConfiguration allows you to access configuration parameters throughout
your codebase that are determined by the Configuration that was set
when the app was compiled. The advantage of this approach over
environment variables (which are set at runtime by xcode) is that the
app can be distributed to devices and maintain the environment info.
See this post from carbon five for the inspiration and more background.
READ THIS FIRST
You need the context of the docs below to understand why this step is necessary, but you want to perform this step first to save some pain.
A side-effect of having multiple Configurations in xcode, which are likely all very similar, is that they are not super fun to maintain. Each entry in the project file will be a giant duplicate of the one before it. So there is a python script included in this project to convert the contents of your Release and Debug configurations into a set of .xcconfig files, each of which can inherit from a parent.
The script does its best to push common settings up the inheritance tree.
The python you have installed (probably 2.7.x) should be fine without any additional libs. You can run it like:
PYTHONPATH=path/to/DIConfiguration python path/to/DIConfiguration/bin/generate-config.py path/to/xcodeproj.pbxproj
It will generate the .xcconfigs in your current path and will not edit your xcode project file.
Just hang on to those files for now.
Xcode sets 2 default configurations on your project ('Release' & 'Debug'). For each environment (e.g., each developer), create an additional configuration.
In Xcode 5, this is done by selecting the project in the Project Navigator view, then selecting the project (as opposed to a target) in the dropdown and ensuring you are on the 'Info' pane.
Click on the '+' to add a new Configuration. It will look something like:
In your -Info.plist file, add a new value of type String with
key Configuration and value ${CONFIGURATION}. This value captures
the value of ${CONFIGURATION} at build time and stores it in the
plist.
Create a file named Environments.plist (it's xcode, but it wherever you
want). Within that file, create a Dictionary for each configuration.
They key for that dictionary should be the name of the configuration.
Also, create one more Dictionary under the key Defaults with
any shared (or default) configuration items.
Here is an example of a complete file:
Now that the environments are set up, you want to switch to using the .xcconfig files that you created at the beginning.
First, point your build configurations to the leaf files in your hierarchy. You can make this change in the same place you created the configurations:
Finally, you need to delete all the settings from the xcode project file.
First, close xcode (or at least the project or workspace you are about to
manually modify). Here, the wise practitioner will also make a backup of
of the project file. Not that you aren't using git.
Search your project file (AwesomeApp.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj) for all
occurrences of buildSettings.
They will look like:
buildSettings = {
SETTING = something;
OTHER_SETTING = something else;
...
};
Remove all the content between the braces, so they look like:
buildSettings = {
};
The settings will be read from the .xcconfig files, so you don't want them overridden by the project.
Open your project in xcode again and try to build it. Should be great. Might not be. Retrace your steps, open an issue, tweet.
Brought to you by Rob Zuber, Travis Vachon, and the distiller.io team.
Open an issue on github or find us on twitter:
Let us know how we can help.
- podify