Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Hudson is written in Java, and although it isn't required, prefers to use the Ant build
tool as the method to execute builds. Since Ant can do just about anything, including
running command line scripts, it is a totally reasonable choice for automating iOS
builds.
Breaking the News to Your IT Department
Maybe you're one of the lucky few, and your company has fully embraced the Apple
work, with Mac Pros and Macbooks as far as the eye can see. More likely, you're living
in la vida Microsoft, with a purchasing department used to buying low-priced Wintel
boxes whenever anyone needs a development machine, and perhaps a Dell or HP server
when you need a heavy-duty build machine.
If you've started doing iOS development inside your company, and you're not using
personal equipment, you've probably already had to break the news to them that you
can only really develop iOS applications on Apple hardware (we'll ignore the world of
the Hackintosh, as that's even less likely to meet with approval from IT than true Apple
gear).
Well, now you get to go back to them and explain that if they want automated builds,
they're going to have to go back to their piggy-bank and pony up the funds for another
Mac of some variety, because you can't build iOS applications on anything but a Mac
either. Unless you're doing an absurdly large amount of builds, you don't need much
of one though. At my day job, we do just fine with a mid-range iMac, reserving the
heavy-duty Mac Pros for developers. In fact, this one machine is now running not only
our iOS builds (for about 10 different code branches), but also our Android, Blackberry
and J2ME feature phone builds!
There are rumblings that there may be ways soon to run Mac OS X Server in a virtual
environment on non-Apple hardware, so that's something to keep an eye out for, but
at the moment, you should start getting the hardware for a dedicated build machine in
the purchasing pipeline if you expect to do automated builds. For the same reason that
having developers produce builds is a bad idea, running automated builds on a machine
that is also used for development is a bad idea.
Provisioning Your Build Machine
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of setting up Hudson, we need to make sure that
the basics for iOS development are available on your new server. Primarily, this means
installing the latest production version of Xcode. You can either copy the disk image
that you used to install Xcode on your development machine, or download a fresh copy
from the iOS Developer Site. You can now also buy a copy of XCode via the Mac App
store.
 
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