Developing Enterprise iOS Applications

Chapter 3. Automating iOS Builds

One of the constants of the Enterprise universe is that, almost before you have your first line of code written, someone will be asking you to set up automated nightly builds with regression testing. And I’m not disagreeing with the practice, because nothing will get a project in trouble faster than the “it worked on my desktop” syndrome. Automated builds are a good way to keep developers honest, and they also can provide a single place for your testing team to get builds to bang on.

And the good news is, with a little bit of finesse, you can get your iOS builds automated, and never have to worry about it again. Apple doesn’t make it easy to do, not so much because the tools aren’t there, but that it can be a scavenger hunt through forums, sparse documentation, and third-party web-sites to find out exactly how to make it tick. What we’ll do in this chapter is to go through the entire process from start to end, so that hopefully you can do it without having to dive into all the research.

Introducing Hudson

There are no lack of build automation systems available these days, and any attempt to cover them all would be far outside the scope of this book. Instead, we’ll look at one popular, open-source build system, called Hudson. Java developers are probably familiar with Hudson, since it is one of the leading tools for build automation in that space. But Hudson can be used for just about any type of build, and if you haven’t already chosen a system, I’d ...