iOS: Using Jenkins for nightly internal builds (TestFlight), plus frequent client builds
- by Amy Worrall
I'm an iOS dev, working for a small agency. I'm currently on a few smaller projects where I'm the only developer. We recently acquired a Jenkins server, but each project is left to fend for themselves as for how to use it.
I'd like to use it for making and distributing builds. My ideal would be:
Every commit is built as a single IPA that is placed in a HTTP-accessible location. (It only needs to keep the latest one, otherwise the disk would fill up — some of our apps are 500MB or more.)
Once a day it makes a build, signs it with our internal provisioning profile, tacks a build number onto the end of the version number, and sends it to our internal TestFlight team.
When manually prompted, it builds the latest commit, gives it a manually specified version number, signs it with the client's provisioning profile and sends it to TestFlight.
I'm pretty new to Jenkins. The developer who set up the server is running it on one of our projects, so I know it has the right stuff installed to do Xcode builds. I believe he's only using it to run unit tests though, not to do any of the code signing, IPA creation or TestFlight stuff.
So my questions:
I've listed three distinct kinds of build. How does Jenkins cope with that? I see there's a "build triggers" section in the config for a Jenkins project, but it doesn't seem to mention different types of build. Should I just set up multiple Jenkins projects, called "App X (continuous)", "App X (nightly)" and "App X (client)"?
How do I specify the provisioning profile through Jenkins? If there isn't a way, I guess I could make different configurations in the Xcode project…
Has anyone else used Jenkins to actually do the release (i.e. build and push to TestFlight) of beta builds of their apps? Is it a good idea? Or should I continue just doing it manually?
