28. April 2017

2 min

Update Xcode with fastlane and Jenkins

Maintaining Xcode on a CI server has always been a hassle. Over the past we suffered through different solutions, from connection via VNC and updating Xcode with the Mac App Store, to manually downloading Xcode from the Developer Portal.

Luckily there is a RubyGem Xcode-Install to install/update Xcode, and has a comfortable fastlane integration. (We will cover more of fastlane very soon 😉 )

Xcode lane

For our projects we created a lane to update Xcode locally and on CI servers:

desc "Install/Update Xcode"
lane :install_xcode do |options|

	# Fetch all available Xcode versions
	sh("xcversion update")
	# List all available Xcode versions 
	sh("xcversion list")

	# Get version from parameter or prompt
	version = options[:xcode_version] || prompt(text: "Enter the version: ")
	xcode_install(version: version)
end

desc "Install/Update Xcode"

lane :install_xcode do |options|

# Fetch all available Xcode versions

sh("xcversion update")

# List all available Xcode versions

sh("xcversion list")

# Get version from parameter or prompt

version = options[:xcode_version] || prompt(text: "Enter the version: ")

xcode_install(version: version)

end

So we can pass the version as a parameter:

If not, we get the prompt:

Jenkins Integration

As we already using Jenkins for our other builds, I wanted to create a job for updating Xcode as well.
The only problem, the xcode-install gem requires the user-password during the installation.

I thought of several solutions, but all of them don’t sound really secure:

Run Jenkins as root user
Allow sudo without password prompt

In the end I found a better solution. It’s possible to pipe the password into sudo and execute fastlane:

#!/bin/bash -l

bundle update
echo ${SUDO} | sudo -SE bundle exec fastlane ios install_xcode xcode_version:"${VERSION}"

#!/bin/bash -l

bundle update

echo ${SUDO} | sudo -SE bundle exec fastlane ios install_xcode xcode_version:"${VERSION}"

Now we can update Xcode in Jenkins:

Xcode lane

Jenkins Integration

Comment article

Recent posts