Generate an .xcscheme file from the command line

Question

I am working on my company\'s continuous integration server, and the build process is failing because the server does not have access to schemes in an xcode project.

Bas

Answer 1

Unfortunately, as of Xcode 5.1.1 there does not exist a mechanism for auto-generating .xcodeproj or .xcworkspace build schemes from the command line as the Xcode UI does. The good news though is that an Xcode project's pbxproj markup is an order of magnitude more complex than the XML markup that describes a build scheme. If you've managed to get CMake to spin up a well-formed Xcode project on-commit, then using a very similar procedure you can build out the 100 or so lines of XML that describe the build-run-test-profile-archive actions of that Xcode project.

If you've not taken a peek at the underlying XML structure of a scheme, create a sample iOS project from the new project wizards and then go poking through the contents of the .xcodeproj or .xcworkspace file for .xcscheme files. The structure is fairly self-documenting and you might even be able to get away without actually specifying the XML markup for those actions you know that will not be run on CI.

Failing that, a less robust approach would be to looking into opening up the Xcode project/workspace file upon the completion of your CMake build process. After a handful of seconds, Xcode's indexer will have had time to identify the projects and auto-generate the schemes for the projects within the master project file itself. Obviously, as you are relying on a UI-layer operation in this approach, you are subject to Xcode's whims, and the indexer may take more than a few seconds to build its index (ex. larger projects will take longer to auto-generate schemes!) ...and there is no trigger advising command-line processes that the indexing and generation has succeeded or failed. You'd wind up having to poll for the existence of a file with an appropriate timeout which can get a bit dicey in an automated build and test environment.