Aral Balkan

If you're beta testing your iPhone apps, you will no doubt be familiar with Ad Hoc builds. These are the builds you send out to your testers along with a mobile provisioning profile that lets them test your app out on their iPhones and iPod Touches.

This involves doing a few repetitive things that I just wrote a script to automate.

Specifically, the Ad Hoc App Packager script automatically:

• Creates an IPA file that users can launch to add your App to iTunes
• Uses the iTunesArtwork file in the IPA so that your app has an icon in iTunes
• Copies the correct mobile provisioning profile into the package folder for you so you can send this to your beta testers.
• Checks that you've updated the version of your app and doesn't let you package it if you haven't
• Backs up your dSYM file so that you can decipher crash reports sent from your beta testers

It was the last point that initially led me down the road to write this script: they don't tell you anywhere that you need to keep those dSYM files if you want to troubleshoot crash builds (the web's littered with people who find out at the worst possible time; when they actually need to do it and have long since overwritten the dSYM files).

To use:

1. Copy the adhoc folder into your Xcode project's folder
2. Run ./adhoc/package
3. Look in the adhoc/packages/<AppVersion> folder to find your IPA and .mobileprovision file. Send those to your beta testers.

I hope this little script makes your life easier (and if it does, I'll gladly let you fuel my App Store addiction by leaving me a tip.)

Get it from GitHub or download it now: adhoc.zip (5KB).

Update: I've merged bug fixes and non-zero exit codes for error conditions thanks to Rasheed Abdul-Aziz (thanks, man + GitHub fork queues rock!) I've also added a --silent (-s) option. If you use it, there will be no output on stdout unless there is an error (good for continuous integration systems or for using as part of a greater automated build process, etc.)

Comments

• I think this script breaks if the XCode project has a space in the name, e.g. IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'Test Project-Info.plist'

  by John on 2009-12-08 11:22:29

• Cool - I'll give this a go.

  by Eric on 2009-11-23 17:07:37

• [...] November, I released a little open source Ad Hoc App Packager script for iPhone apps, raved about the Star Trek movie being released on USB, and blogged on Importing YouTube comments [...]

  by Aral Balkan · 2009 retrospective on 2009-12-31 18:28:20

• [...] out the Ad Hoc Packager script I released that is far better than the old bash [...]

  by Aral Balkan · A little Bash script for speeding up Ad Hoc iPhone distribution builds on 2010-02-07 14:31:00

• Also, I was getting some weird errors, I believe because my configuration name "Ad Hoc" has a space in it.

  by Matt Rix on 2010-03-24 06:29:35

• Great script! It took me a bunch of attempts to get it to work correctly, so it'd be nice if you could make it so that if there's an error, it deletes the version folder(ie. packages/1.001 etc.), so that I don't have to do it manually every single time.

  by Matt Rix on 2010-03-24 06:26:32

• It works really well, and it resolve my "resources have been modified" problem.

  by Nan on 2010-05-10 11:57:59

• [...] “From Hacker to microISV” scripts for prepping for ad hoc distribution and Aral’s packaging script for actual distribution.  I think it’s better to have the script in place as opposed to [...]

  by Xcode, versioning, build scripts | Rambling and rumination on 2010-10-06 04:46:49