Build fat static library (device + simulator) using Xcode and SDK 4+

Question

It appears that we can - theoretically - build a single static library that includes both simulator and iPhone and iPad.

However, Apple has no documentation on this

Answer 1

I actually just wrote my own script for this purpose. It doesn't use Xcode. (It's based off a similar script in the Gambit Scheme project.)

Basically, it runs ./configure and make three times (for i386, armv7, and armv7s), and combines each of the resulting libraries into a fat lib.

Answer 2

XCode 12 update:

If you run xcodebuild without -arch param, XCode 12 will build simulator library with architecture "arm64 x86_64" as default.

Then run xcrun -sdk iphoneos lipo -create -output will conflict, because arm64 architecture exist in simulator and also device library.

I fork script from Adam git and fix it.

Answer 3

I have spent many hours trying to build a fat static library that will work on armv7, armv7s, and the simulator. Finally found a solution.

The gist is to build the two libraries (one for the device and then one for the simulator) separately, rename them to distinguish from each other, and then lipo -create them into one library.

lipo -create libPhone.a libSimulator.a -output libUniversal.a

I tried it and it works!

Answer 4

There is a command-line utility xcodebuild and you can run shell command within xcode. So, if you don't mind using custom script, this script may help you.

#Configurations.
#This script designed for Mac OS X command-line, so does not use Xcode build variables.
#But you can use it freely if you want.

TARGET=sns
ACTION="clean build"
FILE_NAME=libsns.a

DEVICE=iphoneos3.2
SIMULATOR=iphonesimulator3.2






#Build for all platforms/configurations.

xcodebuild -configuration Debug -target ${TARGET} -sdk ${DEVICE} ${ACTION} RUN_CLANG_STATIC_ANALYZER=NO
xcodebuild -configuration Debug -target ${TARGET} -sdk ${SIMULATOR} ${ACTION} RUN_CLANG_STATIC_ANALYZER=NO
xcodebuild -configuration Release -target ${TARGET} -sdk ${DEVICE} ${ACTION} RUN_CLANG_STATIC_ANALYZER=NO
xcodebuild -configuration Release -target ${TARGET} -sdk ${SIMULATOR} ${ACTION} RUN_CLANG_STATIC_ANALYZER=NO







#Merge all platform binaries as a fat binary for each configurations.

DEBUG_DEVICE_DIR=${SYMROOT}/Debug-iphoneos
DEBUG_SIMULATOR_DIR=${SYMROOT}/Debug-iphonesimulator
DEBUG_UNIVERSAL_DIR=${SYMROOT}/Debug-universal

RELEASE_DEVICE_DIR=${SYMROOT}/Release-iphoneos
RELEASE_SIMULATOR_DIR=${SYMROOT}/Release-iphonesimulator
RELEASE_UNIVERSAL_DIR=${SYMROOT}/Release-universal

rm -rf "${DEBUG_UNIVERSAL_DIR}"
rm -rf "${RELEASE_UNIVERSAL_DIR}"
mkdir "${DEBUG_UNIVERSAL_DIR}"
mkdir "${RELEASE_UNIVERSAL_DIR}"

lipo -create -output "${DEBUG_UNIVERSAL_DIR}/${FILE_NAME}" "${DEBUG_DEVICE_DIR}/${FILE_NAME}" "${DEBUG_SIMULATOR_DIR}/${FILE_NAME}"
lipo -create -output "${RELEASE_UNIVERSAL_DIR}/${FILE_NAME}" "${RELEASE_DEVICE_DIR}/${FILE_NAME}" "${RELEASE_SIMULATOR_DIR}/${FILE_NAME}"

Maybe looks inefficient(I'm not good at shell script), but easy to understand. I configured a new target running only this script. The script is designed for command-line but not tested in :)

The core concept is xcodebuild and lipo.

I tried many configurations within Xcode UI, but nothing worked. Because this is a kind of batch processing, so command-line design is more suitable, so Apple removed batch build feature from Xcode gradually. So I don't expect they offer UI based batch build feature in future.