Preventing merge conflicts with XcodeGen

Hello, Habr! On the eve of the start of the course “iOS Developer. Professional” prepared for you a traditional translation of useful material. We also invite those who wish to online meeting with the course teacherwhere you can ask the teacher the questions you are interested in about the training.

And finally, we suggest watching the webinar recording “Writing an application in SwiftUI and Combine.”

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I – Introduction

In this article, we will look at solution for instant resolution of merge conflicts in a file .xcodeprojwhich is one of the most time-consuming challenges facing iOS and macOS development teams today.

By the end of this article, you will have a work environment that enables conflict-free merging.

II – Before we begin

1. Introduction to XcodeGen

yonaskolb / XcodeGen

github.com

XcodeGen Is a console utility written in Swift that generates an Xcode project based on your folder structure and project specification.

For installation XcodeGen we will use Brew… Just run brew install xcodegen in terminal (more installation options and instructions can be found here).

2. Project

Most projects these days are not that simple. They have several configurations, dependencies (provided by third parties or developed as part of a project), scripts that run as part of the build process, CI, etc.

In this guide, you will learn how to set up step by step projectwhich is simple enough to explain the point XcodeGenwhile being complex enough to cover a wide enough range of use cases.

As we can see above, the project contains:

• Framework Dependencies

• Carthage-dependencies

• Schemes and configuration

• Build scripts

III – Setting

1. Setting up the project

Project (sample project) which we will be using in this tutorial has carthage-dependencies. Just run makeProject.sh in the terminal. This will set up the project with all its dependencies and we can start the tutorial.

2. Creating the specification file of the XcodeGen project

In the root of your project create a folder named XcodeGen (the folder name does not need to be like this) with a file named project.yml (this file name is also optional).

XcodeGen/project.yml: Initial setup:

name: GoodToGo
options:
  bundleIdPrefix: com.GoodToGo
  xcodeVersion: '12.0.1'
  deploymentTarget: '12.0'
  groupSortPosition: top
  generateEmptyDirectories: true
  findCarthageFrameworks: true
  minimumXcodeGenVersion: '2.18.0'

During our initial setup for the file .xcodeproj we choose name – GoodToGo -, package prefix – com.GoodToGo -, Xcode version, deployment target …

3. Starting XcodeGen for the first time

Using the above configuration, we can create our new project by running xcodegen -s ./XcodeGen/project.yml -p ./ in the terminal.

note that ./XcodeGen/project.yml Is the path to our project specification file. If you choose a different folder / file name, you will also need to correct them here.

A green message indicates that the project has been created. Hooray, we have successfully created our project!

Now let’s open it up and see what it looks like:

Not what we expected … All our schemas are missing, all frameworks, everything. They are missing because we did not define them in our project.yml file.

4. Adding configurations and the main target of the project

XcodeGen/project.yml: Adding configurations. Just add this to your file project.yml:

configs:
  Debug.Dev: debug   
  Debug.Prod: debug
  Release: release

targets:
  GoodToGo:
    type: application
    platform: iOS
    deploymentTarget: 12.0
    settings:
      base:
        MARKETING_VERSION: 1.0
    sources:
       - path: ../GoodToGo

Basically, we are creating 3 configurations – Debug.Dev, Debug.Prod and Release, and declare that the main target of our application will be called GoodToGo, with target platform iOS 12 (minimum version) and the source files are in the folder GoodToGo…

The folder must exist in the system folders, otherwise you will get the following error:

Spec validation error: Target “GoodToGo” has a missing source directory 
“/Users/ricardosantos/Desktop/GitHub/RJPS_Articles/7/sourcecode/THE_FOLDER_THAT_DOES_NOT_EXISTS_NAME”

Try again with our updated configuration (previous image) and …

… now we have (previous image) schemas, configurations and application target!

5. Adding frameworks

The next thing we need to do is add the dependencies of our frameworks. For each of them, we need to select the platform, type, target and other parameters.

We know from the beginning that usually all frameworks have the same settings, so we’ll create a template and name it Framework.

Below you can see a simple template that we will refer to in our main project.yml file and then where needed.

XcodeGen/project.yml: Create a template:

targetTemplates:
  Framework:
    type: framework
    platform: iOS
    deploymentTarget: 11.0
    settings:
      base:
        MARKETING_VERSION: 1.0

This template states that all targets will have the following conditions:

• a type framework,

• platform iOS,

• version 1.0,

• a target platform for deployment equal to or higher than iOS 11.0…

In our sample project, we had the following framework dependencies (see below).

We’ll add a couple of things to test: AppTheme and AppResources.

Starting with our project.yml file in the targets section, we will add 2 new entries (AppTheme and AppResources). For these targets, we have to define the source folder and template name as explained in the previous step.

 AppTheme:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppTheme
  AppResources:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppResources

XcodeGen/project.yml: Adding Targets Using a Template

Let’s try again with our updated configuration (previous image) and …

… we now have the main target of our application and the 2 dependencies that we just added to our spec file.

Small summary: target section in our project.yml should look like this:

targets:
  GoodToGo:
    type: application
    platform: iOS
    deploymentTarget: 12.0
    settings:
      base:
        MARKETING_VERSION: 1.0
    sources:
       - path: ../GoodToGo
  AppTheme:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppTheme
  AppResources:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppResources

To complete the configuration, we need to add the rest of the frameworks, after which our file project.yml should look like this:

name: GoodToGo

## options section ##

options:
  bundleIdPrefix: com.GoodToGo
  xcodeVersion: '12.0.1'
  deploymentTarget: '12.0'
  groupSortPosition: top
  generateEmptyDirectories: true
  findCarthageFrameworks: true
  minimumXcodeGenVersion: '2.18.0'

## configs section ##

configs:
  Debug.Dev: debug
  Debug.Prod: debug
  Release: release

## targetTemplates section ##

targetTemplates:
  Framework:
    type: framework
    platform: iOS
    deploymentTarget: 11.0
    settings:
      base:
        MARKETING_VERSION: 1.0

## targets section ##
        
targets:
  GoodToGo:
    type: application
    platform: iOS
    deploymentTarget: 11.0
    settings:
      base:
        MARKETING_VERSION: 1.0
    sources:
       - path: ../GoodToGo
  AppTheme:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppTheme
  AppResources:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppResources
  AppConstants:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../AppConstants
  Core:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Core
  Core.GalleryApp:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Core.GalleryApp
  Domain:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Domain
  Core.GalleryApp:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Core.GalleryApp
  Designables:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Designables    
  DevTools:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../DevTools   
  Extensions:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Extensions   
  Factory:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Factory   
  PointFreeFunctions:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../PointFreeFunctions   
  Repositories:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Repositories    
  Repositories.WebAPI:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../Repositories.WebAPI         
  UIBase:
    templates: 
      - Framework
    sources: 
      - path: ../UIBase  

  Test.GoodToGo:
    type: bundle.unit-test
    platform: iOS
    sources:
       - path: ../Test.GoodToGo
    scheme: {}