xcodeenvironments's Introduction

Xcode environments

Example project for setting up different environments in Xcode with configurations & schemes. This allows us to easily switch between environments and create builds.

Setup

Rename the existing configurations from Debug & Release to Debug Dev & Release Dev. These will be the debug configurations.
Duplicate the debug configuration twice and create Debug Stag & Debug Prod. Do the same thing again for Release Stag & Release Prod.
Add a User defined setting, called BASE_URL, and set the values for each configuration.
Open the Info.plist and add a key called BaseUrl with the value $(BASE_URL). This will allow us to read the value of the user defined setting from the app Bundle.
Rename the current scheme from the app name to Dev, and create two new schemes Stag & Prod. Make sure all the schemes are Shared so they get commited to source control and are shared between all devs.
Edit each scheme and set the correct Build Configuration for each step. Run, Test & Analyze should have the Debug configurations, Profile and Archive Release.
After this is done we can read the baseUrl value in the app code from the main bundle info dictionary.

Example

Access the baseUrl from code

if let info = Bundle.main.infoDictionary, let baseUrl = info["BaseUrl"] as? String {
  print(baseUrl)
}

Options

There are a lot of options that can be different between app environments

Different bundle ids can be set for different environments. This will allow us to have multiple versions of the app installed side by side on the same device. The issue with this approach is that we will not be able to distribute dev & stag builds to testers via Testflight since an app on AppStore connect is tied to a specific bundle id
Different app names or icons are a great name to easily distinguish which version we have installed.
Preprocessor macros can be used to toggle parts of the code for each environment.

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