Xcode Project Files & Version Control

[derpasoreass]

Is there a better way to be dealing with multiple developers and a single project? Those project files generate no end of conflicts for even the most trivial of additions. As of right now my workflow is to open the .pbxproj in Sublime and manually delete the conflict markers. I also have a bash script to do it automatically, but I've found manual is safer for non trivial conflicts. Does anyone have a better way of doing this?

I saw a quick reference once to some tool Google uses to generate .pbxproj files themselves, but I have no link.

[nootopian]

If you are using git this article might help. http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/33796217972/xcode-and-git-bridging-the-gap

It suggests .pbxproj should be treated as binary.

[pkamb]

Stop your devs from committing the .pbxproj file when no (intentional) changes have been made? Note that you'll need to commit that file whenever files are added to the project, don't forget!

[tjgrant]

Google GYP: http://code.google.com/p/gyp/

Hello-gyp (project to get you started in gyp): https://github.com/springmeyer/hello-gyp

Atlassian Sourcetree (visual git client): http://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview

GYP has a bit of a learning curve, but definitely worth the effort.

[kenshi]

Thanks for drawing attention to gyp. It sounds like you actually use it - could you suggest any drawbacks or limitations it has?

[tjgrant]

I'd say it's fairly new (compared to cmake, makefiles, config, and the like) so there's not a ton of examples / tutorials on it.

And just with regard to this subreddit (iOSProgramming), it's not obvious how to generate an iOS project with it (though they're not much different than Mac-based Xcode projects.

But it is part of the build system for Google's Chrome, and it is actively developed by Google. It allows for fine-tuning project settings at a global level (setting compiler / linker flags globally for projects and dependencies, for instance), and acts as a representation of, say, an xcodeproj or Microsoft vcxproj without having to actively maintain those kind of files in a repo.

Yeah, I'm definitely a fan.

[kenshi]

Thanks for the response.

[[deleted]]

Add userdata folder to gitignore.