Ansible Provisioning of iOS Development & Continuous Integration

This role can be used to setup iOS Continuous Integration Service on macOS. This role also canbe used for the setting up local development environment for the iOS Developer. It has all the tools required for the iOS Developers like Xcode, Swift fastlane, carthage, cocoapods and lot's of homebrew packages, however you can have full control to configure your own environment with varibales. Xcode installation needs pre-downloaded XIP file but installing simulators and command line tools has been automated by this role. This role is fully tested for

• macOS Seirra
• Xcode 8.0.2
• Xcode 8.3 beta xip

This should work from Xcode 8 onward as xip format is supported from Xcode 8 onwards.

Requirements

• Install Ansible using pip Ansible is python library so we can install using pipefail

       $ easy_install pip
       $ pip install ansible
  

If you want to setup Xcode and related tools then

• Download Xcode XIP and Place it inside ~/Documents Downloading Xcode needs Apple Developer account and it's hard to automate Xcode Installation process. You need to have Xcode XIP file downloaded from Apple developer portal. You must put it inside ~/Documents/ directory.

It's not ideal but Xcode is proprietary software so only requirement is to put xcode.xip it inside ~/Documents/ directory.

What's in this role:

This role comes with following softwares packages to provision iOS Continuous Integration Server.

• Xcode
• Swiftenv : Version manager for Swift
• iOS Dependency Management tools like Carthage, Cocoapods and Swift Package Manager.
• iOS Continuous Delivery tools i.e Fastlane tools
• macOS defaults : Controls defaults and Software Updates
• Homebrew : Package Manager for macOS
• Homebrew packages like git, carthage, swiftlint, mas, cmake, rbenv, curl, wget etc etc
• Homebrew Cask packages
• RVM and customised Ruby versions
• Pre-installed Gems like bundler, fastlane, Cocoapods, xcpretty
• Xcode 8 + Installation Script when xip is in the ~/Documents/ directory
• Install Comand Line Tools for the Xcode
• Install Xcode Simulator (9.2 but you can change anytime)

You can customise your own playbook to overirde defaults and create your own playbook.

Role Varibales:

This role has lot of varibales which can be used to configure your own playbook. Please refer defaults/main.yml for list of all varibales. ** You can override defaults/main.yml varibales to configure your own **. The main varibales are :

Xcode Related Variables

• configure_xcode You can skip the Xcode Configuration by setting that to no, then it won't install Xcode, Xcode Command Line tools and simulators. You can enable Xcode installation by placing Xcode XIP in the ~/Documents/ directory and set the varibale to yes.

Custom Swift and Ruby Version Manager Variables

• configure_custom_swift Xcode 8 comes with default Swift however we can use different Swift toolchain. You can set it to yes then you need to configure swift_version_custom varibale with value of Swift version that you want e.g 3.0.1

• configure_ruby_rvm macOS comes with default Ruby 2.0.0 but it's hard to manage Rubygems using system Ruby. We can use version management tools like RVM by setting configure_ruby_rvm varibale to yes and setting ruby-version value to Ruby version we want e.g 2.4.0

macOS Defaults and Software Updates Related Varibales

You can turn ON or OFF the macOS defaults defaults by putting commands inside the varibales macos_sleep_options, macos_animation_options and macos_software_autoupdates e.g

macos_sleep_options:
  - systemsetup -setsleep Never
  - systemsetup -setharddisksleep Never

Homebrew Related Varibales

You can customise Homebrew installtion path using homebrew_install_path and list of packages using homebrew_installed_packages and Homebrew Cask Applications using homebrew_cask_apps varibales. You can also list the Homebrew taps using homebrew_taps Varibales.

How to use this Role:

Imagine, you have fresh Mac with fresh macOS installed. You can setup all your iOS Development environment by creating Playbook for this role. You can setup config varibales as per your need.

Assuming you have installed Ansible, we can download the role by running command

       $ $ ansible-galaxy install Shashikant86.ansible-ios-ci

Now that, we have to create our own playbook for this role by setting values in the config.yml files. We can use defaults/main.tml file here then we can create a playbook to use this file as configuration. The example playbook looks like this

Example Playbook

Assuming that we have config.yml file at the same location as playbook.yml file. We can created playbook.yml like this

---
- hosts: all
  connection: local
  remote_user: root

  vars_files:
    - config.yml

  pre_tasks:
    - include_vars: "{{ item }}"
      with_fileglob:
        - ../config.yml

  roles:
    - Shashikant86.ansible-ios-ci
    

Please refer playbook/config inside the tests directory as an example.

You don't need to create config.yml file if you can use all the varibale inside the playbook.yml. This might cause playbook file became too lenthy.

Setting up Continuous Intrgration with Travis

We can test this role on TravisCI by disabling the Xcode config as TravisCI has it's own Xcode images. We can test all other things on TravisCI. You can see the TravisCI config in the .travis.yml and playbook/config inside the tests directory. You can see TravisCI output here

Dependencies

This role has dependency on geerlingguy.homebrew to install all the homebrew packages.

License

MIT

Author Information

Shashikant Jagtap