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ios-command-line-tool

This project shows how to compile a command line tool for iOS using Xcode. Xcode offers a template called "Command Line Tool" for macOS, but that template is not available for iOS. Nonetheless, Xcode can be persuaded to build standalone Mach-O executables for iOS as well.

This technique has been tested with Xcode 9.3 and iOS 11.1.2.

Build on Your System

Building the tool on your system requires updating signing information and deployment info. You can do that from Xcode or from the command line.

In order to build on your system you need a developer account. You find out if you have one by running the security find-identity command below on macOS. If you get an output similar to the one below, you have a developer account:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX "iPhone Developer: AAAAAAA (BBBBBBBBBB)"

If you don't have a developer account you need to create one. See the instructions here.

Building on Xcode

Open the ios-command-line-tool.xcodeproj folder in Xcode (by using File -> Open in Xcode), click on the ios-command-line-tool top icon in the project navigator (left side), then go to the General tab (in the middle view). In the Signing section choose your Team. Once you do that, other issues will disappear.

You may need to enable the Project Navigator view in Xcode. You do that by using View -> Navigators -> Show Project Navigator.

If you want to build for an earlier version of iOS, go to the Deployment Info section in the middle view and choose the Deployment Target of your choice.

You can now build the executable in Xcode (Product -> Build). The executable file will by default be located in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/ios-command-line-tool-XXXXXXXXXXXX/Build/Products/Debug-iphoneos/ios-command-line-tool (see more on that here). For example:

$ file ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/ios-command-line-tool-ffawlhgezawmrmfewovgtsimimkd/Build/Products/Debug-iphoneos/ios-command-line-tool
/Users/razvan/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/ios-command-line-tool-ffawlhgezawmrmfewovgtsimimkd/Build/Products/Debug-iphoneos/ios-command-line-tool: Mach-O 64-bit arm64 executable, flags:<NOUNDEFS|DYLDLINK|TWOLEVEL|PIE>

Building on the Command Line

You can bypass using Xcode IDE altogether and resort to using the command line. You use the Makefile and the make command.

Similar to the Xcode configuration, you first need to choose your development team. Create a vars.mk file by copying vars.mk.sample:

cp vars.mk.sample vars.mk

Now update the DEV_TEAM and the IOS_TARGET variables to proper values. You can find out existing development teams by running the one liner below, as shown here.

security find-identity -v -p codesigning | awk -F \" '{if ($2) print $2}' | while read acct ; do security find-certificate -a -c "$acct" -p | openssl x509 -text | grep "^ *Subject:" | awk -v acct="$acct" -F , '{if ($3) {sub(/ *OU=/,"",$3);print $3","acct}}' ; done

In the vars.mk file update the DEV_TEAM with one of the team IDs from output lines above and the IOS_TARGET with the iOS version you want to use.

Now use make build the executable. The executable will be located in build/Release-iphoneos/ios-command-line-tool:

$ file build/Release-iphoneos/ios-command-line-tool
build/Release-iphoneos/ios-command-line-tool: Mach-O 64-bit arm64 executable, flags:<NOUNDEFS|DYLDLINK|TWOLEVEL|PIE>

You can use make clean to clean the project.

License

The ios-command-line-tool template is released into the public domain.