XcodeGen

XcodeGen is a command line tool written in Swift that generates your Xcode project using your folder structure and a project spec.

The project spec is a YAML or JSON file that defines your targets, configurations, schemes, custom build settings and many other options. All your source directories are automatically parsed and referenced appropriately while preserving your folder structure. Sensible defaults are used in many places, so you only need to customize what is needed. Very complex projects can also be defined using more advanced features.

✅ Generate projects on demand and remove your .xcodeproj from git, which means no more merge conflicts!
✅ Groups and files in Xcode are always synced to your directories on disk
✅ Easy configuration of projects which is human readable and git friendly
✅ Easily copy and paste files and directories without having to edit anything in Xcode
✅ Share build settings across multiple targets with build setting groups
✅ Automatically generate Schemes for different environments like test and production
✅ Easily create new projects with complicated setups on demand without messing around with Xcode
✅ Generate from anywhere including on CI
✅ Distribute your spec amongst multiple files for easy sharing and overriding
✅ Easily create multi-platform frameworks
✅ Integrate Carthage frameworks without any work
✅ Export Dependency Diagrams to view in Graphviz

Given an example project spec:

name: MyProject
include:
  - base_spec.yml
options:
  bundleIdPrefix: com.myapp
packages:
  Yams:
    url: https://github.com/jpsim/Yams
    from: 2.0.0
targets:
  MyApp:
    type: application
    platform: iOS
    deploymentTarget: "10.0"
    sources: [MyApp]
    settings:
      configs:
        debug:
          CUSTOM_BUILD_SETTING: my_debug_value
        release:
          CUSTOM_BUILD_SETTING: my_release_value
    dependencies:
      - target: MyFramework
      - carthage: Alamofire
      - framework: Vendor/MyFramework.framework
      - sdk: Contacts.framework
      - sdk: libc++.tbd
      - package: Yams
  MyFramework:
    type: framework
    platform: iOS
    sources: [MyFramework]

A project would be created with 2 connected targets, with all the required configurations and build settings. See the Project Spec documentation for all the options you can specify, and Usage for more general documentation.

Installing

Make sure Xcode 11 is installed first.

Mint

mint install yonaskolb/xcodegen

Make

git clone https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen.git
cd XcodeGen
make install

Homebrew

brew install xcodegen

Swift Package Manager

Use as CLI

git clone https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen.git
cd XcodeGen
swift run xcodegen

Use as dependency

Add the following to your Package.swift file’s dependencies:

.package(url: "https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen.git", from: "2.35.0"),

And then import wherever needed: import XcodeGenKit

Usage

Simply run:

xcodegen generate

This will look for a project spec in the current directory called project.yml and generate an Xcode project with the name defined in the spec.

Options:

–spec: An optional path to a .yml or .json project spec. Defaults to project.yml. (It is also possible to link to multiple spec files by comma separating them. Note that all other flags will be the same.)
–project: An optional path to a directory where the project will be generated. By default this is the directory the spec lives in.
–quiet: Suppress informational and success messages.
–use-cache: Used to prevent unnecessarily generating the project. If this is set, then a cache file will be written to when a project is generated. If xcodegen is later run but the spec and all the files it contains are the same, the project won’t be generated.
–cache-path: A custom path to use for your cache file. This defaults to ~/.xcodegen/cache/{PROJECT_SPEC_PATH_HASH}

There are other commands as well such as xcodegen dump which lets out output the resolved spec in many different formats, or write it to a file. Use xcodegen help to see more detailed usage information.

Dependency Diagrams

Click to expand!

How to export dependency diagrams:

To stdout:

xcodegen dump --type graphviz

To a file:

xcodegen dump --type graphviz --file Graph.viz

During implementation, graphviz formatting was validated using GraphvizOnline, WebGraphviz, and Graphviz on MacOS.

Editing

git clone https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen.git
cd XcodeGen
swift package generate-xcodeproj

This uses Swift Package Manager to create an xcodeproj file that you can open, edit and run in Xcode, which makes editing any code easier.

If you want to pass any required arguments when running in Xcode, you can edit the scheme to include launch arguments.

Documentation

See Project Spec documentation for all the various properties and options that can be set
See Usage for more specific usage and use case documentation
See FAQ for a list of some frequently asked questions
See Examples for some real world XcodeGen project specs out in the wild