I’ve been playing with TestFlight this week with some of my apps. The main aim of my experimentation was to have the version numbers of my apps incremented and the IPA automatically uploaded when I archive a project.
There’s a lot of posts already on various parts of the process, but I’d thought I’d document the whole process I went through as there were a few tweaks to be made on the snippets of code I found.
I’ve projects both in local SVN repos and on GitHub so I need to be able to create version numbers from both. Another wrinkle is that I sometimes use HockeyApp as well, so I decided I may as well be prepared for those occasions and include it in the script.
The first step was to increment the version number. A post from Stackoverflow gave me the starting point and with a few minor tweaks I ended up with this:
This script needs to be run before Xcode does a build. To do this, it should be added as a ‘Pre-action’ to the build function. Edit you scheme, click the down arrow beside ‘Build’, select ‘Pre-actions’ and then on the + at the bottom left of the box on the right. You’ll be given two options and you’ll want to select ‘New Run Script Action’. Select your target in the drop down beside ‘Provide build settings from’ and paste the script from above into the box below that.
Now when you archive your project the Bundle Version will be updated.
For git, we just adjust the REV line:
We could have used something like ‘git describe –dirty’ here instead, which would produce something like 1.2.1-1-ge03a85c-dirty as the version number. But when you submit the app to Apple if the version number isn’t all digits your app will fail validation so you’ll have to manually change it beforehand. Since this is something I’m prone to forget so I’d rather just have the digits.
After the version number has been updated, Xcode creates the archive and then we need to create the IPA upload it. This is done by adding a script to the ‘Post-actions’ of the ‘Archive’ action.
Justin Miller’s post ‘Automating Development Uploads to TestFlight from Xcode‘ got me most of the way creating and uploading the IPA to TestFlight. There’s been a few forks of the original gist, and I ended up extending one by c0diq to include uploading to HockeyApp. I also added a couple of extra flags to make the script less chatty when you know you want to upload the IPA on archive and when you know the code signing identity to always use.
Something to note is that HockeyApp is less tolerant of duplicate bundle versions than TestFlight so if you’ve not made any commits since the previous version, the upload will fail. You’ll be able to see the error returned by HockeyApp in the error dialog and more details in the log.
That’s pretty much it. It seems to be working fine at the moment but I’m sure I’ll end up with a few more refinements as time goes on.
