Xcode is slow. Enough said. What's worse, sometimes I find myself relying too much on auto-completion with Cocoa Touch, a blessing and a curse!
So I searched for an alternative workflow in command line. The result was
rather confusing: there are posts about using xctool or xcodebuild to
build Xcode targets, using ios-sim, simctl or instruments to manage and
manage or launch simulators. Most of the information is out of date.
Eventually though, I was able to piece together an answer for my needs. That is, given an iOS project set up with Xcode 6, I want to
- build a target.
- launch a iOS simulator.
- install the built .app bundle to the launched simulator.
- run the installed app.
- uninstall the app from the simulator.
All in command line, with Xcode closed.
Before we proceed to the steps, you need to gather a few pieces of information:
- the Xcode build scheme of your choice (e.g. "AwesomeApp").
- your app bundle ID (e.g. "com.awesome.app").
- name of an existing simulator (e.g. "iPhone 6 Plus"). If you don't want to
look it up in Xcode GUI, look for it in output of command
xcrun simctl list.
Ready? Here we go.
(These commands should be run in the project folder).
Build the target:
xcodebuild -scheme AwesomeApp -destination 'platform=iphonesimulator,name=iPhone 6 Plus' -derivedDataPath build
Launch the simulator:
xcrun instruments -w 'iPhone 6 Plus'
Install the bundle (after simulator is launched and target is built with previous commands):
xcrun simctl install booted build/Build/Products/Debug-iphonesimulator/AwesomeApp.app
Launch the app in simulator (after it's installed with the previous command):
xcrun simctl launch booted com.awesome.app
Uninstall the bundle:
xcrun simctl uninstall booted com.awesome.app
Quite a few parameters needs to be added for the build step if you have a comlex project. Please RTFMs. Write some script to automate the steps, if are a lazy typiest like me.