Is there any documentation for building Xcode 4 plugins?

Question

Recently I\'ve noticed a couple of projects on github that extend the functionality of Xcode 4 via plugins.

Two projects as examples by @olemoritz:

• MiniXc

Answer 1

As I wrote those plugins you mentioned, here are some pointers:

• There is no official documentation from Apple, so while Xcode does have a plugin infrastructure, it is entirely private API. (but hey, no one wants to submit Xcode plugins to the App Store, right? ;)) – The usual warnings apply: You should code very defensively, and it's possible that Xcode updates break things. Any plugin can bring Xcode down entirely, so be careful.

• There is a seemingly abandoned effort to document the plugin interface here.

• There are some open source projects that allow you to see what's needed to get a plugin loaded at all, e.g. mine and there's CLITool-Infoplist (I think that's where I got the basic structure from, but I can't really remember, because I've been doing this without publishing anything for quite a while).

• You can use class-dump to generate headers from Xcode's private frameworks, e.g. IDEKit and IDEFoundation (in Xcode.app/Contents/Frameworks). Reading those gives you quite a bit of information on how Xcode is structured internally. DVTKit and DVTFoundation (in Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks) can also be useful to class-dump.

• You can observe all notifications that are sent in Xcode by registering an observer for nil. I initially just logged all those notifications to get an idea of where I might be able to hook into.

Good luck!

Answer 2

There is no formal API or documentation.

Having said that nearly all community plugins are open sourced, use http://alcatraz.io to discover new plugins, then follow their github source code to learn how people are implementing them.

Here are some useful resources:

• Use https://github.com/edwardaux/XcodeExplorer to discover the API hook point you need to be poking around.
• Look at http://www.blackdogfoundry.com/blog/creating-an-xcode4-plugin/ for a series of posts about building Xcode plugins.
• Check https://github.com/kattrali/Xcode-Plugin-Template for a Xcode 6+ template for creating new plugins.
• Look at https://github.com/zats/AdjustFontSize-Xcode-Plugin as a good Xcode 7.1+ starting point
• See http://www.blackdogfoundry.com/blog/debugging-your-xcode-plugin/ for debugging aid