When developing for the iPhone it’s often necessary to build the application in a form that can be easily installed by collaborators and testers. For ease of installation, the app should be distributed as a .ipa (iPhone Application) file. Unfortunately, XCode does not include a way to do this, so I wrote a bash script to automate the process.
Additionally, in any build that leaves the developer’s desk it is especially important to include version information so that bug reports can be traced back to the correct version of the source, and to ensure that any distributed version can be located in the version control system. I use git for source control (installed with MacPorts), though the script should be easily adaptible to CVS or SVN.
The goals for this script were:
- Automatically tag the project with a unique build number before each build.
- Build all supported configurations with a single command. Sometimes compiler errors or warnings are only revealed with certain preprocessor flags or optimization settings.
- Ensure any build created for distribution is cleanly committed to version control and tagged.
- Name tags so that they can be easily correlated to user-visible version information.
