turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef

Writing by tag: ci

Automatically assign milestones with GitHub Actions

04 August 2022

One of the most important parts of software development is tracking changes. Documenting what is going into a release is necessary not only to simply know what changed and inform your users by writing good release notes, but also to track down issues when something goes wrong. If there’s a new bug or a new crash in your latest release, you need to be able to quickly find the change that introduced the problem.

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Using fastlane to increment version numbers in xcconfig files

28 March 2022

If you are using fastlane to automate your release process, you might be using the increment_version_number and increment_build_number actions to bump your version and build numbers, respectively. However, if your Xcode project is configured to use xcconfig files, then you are out of luck. Shockingly, fastlane does not seem to support projects that use xcconfig files and there is a surprising dearth of information online about how to make fastlane work with Xcode build configuration files.

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Automate merging release branches into your main branch with GitHub Actions

26 March 2022

A typical release process for Git workflows involves creating a release branch, performing various tests on that branch, and applying any necessary fixes or changes to that branch. Once stable and ready to release, you create a build from the release branch, create a git tag, and finally merge the release branch changes back into your main branch.

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Useful label-based GitHub Actions workflows

24 August 2021
Updated: 21 March 2022

My current team has started using GitHub Actions to automate some tedious tasks for pull requests. In particular, we use labels on GitHub to categorize pull requests or highlight important metadata about them. Most of the time, a machine can figure out which labels are appropriate to add or remove. This is a great use case for GitHub Actions.

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Xcode UI testing reliability tips for iOS

17 March 2021
Updated: 18 March 2021

Xcode’s UI testing framework has had its ups and downs over the years. Most recently, it has been much more robust and reliable in my experience. However, tests still tend to flake sometimes. Here are some ways that I have been able to reduce flakiness in UI tests.

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Useful Danger rules for Bitrise

20 December 2020

This is a quick follow-up to my previous post. The client project I’m working on is also using Bitrise for CI, which I must say is quite good. If you are looking for a hosted CI service I would highly recommend checking them out.

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Running multiple instances of Danger

15 December 2020

For a client project that I’ve been working on, I recently integrated Danger to automate pull requests for the team. I initially setup a single Dangerfile to run on CI, but soon after we had the need to split it up in order to run danger more than once for a single CI run.

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Mac app tests fail with hardened runtime enabled

23 February 2020

I recently discovered that unit tests and UI tests for a macOS Xcode project will fail with obscure error messages if the hardened runtime is enabled. It took me awhile to realize what the actual source of the problem was, because the error messages led me in the wrong direction. Hopefully this will save you some time.

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Selecting an Xcode version on GitHub Actions CI

06 January 2020

I have started using GitHub Actions for CI on a new project as a replacement for my usual setup on Travis CI. It generally seems to be much faster and more reliable so far. It also has an equivalent feature set, as far as I can tell. But one issue that I have run into is selecting a specific Xcode version, which is a bit cumbersome and not fully documented.

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