iOS CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Explained

iOS CI/CD Continuous integration and continuous
delivery (CI/CD) is widely used by
development teams, even in open-source
communities. It offers a sustainable way to
test and deploy code many times a day
without the hurdle of doing it manually.
In this guide, you’ll learn the foundations of
getting started with CI/CD for iOS.
Continuous Integration
and Continuous Delivery
Explained
1

Contents:
1. The importance of CI/CD for iOS developers
2. Principles of iOS CI/CD
3. The top benefits of CI/CD for iOS
4. Best practices to remember for iOS CI/CD
5. An iOS CI/CD workflow example
6. Getting started with CI/CD for iOS
7. Choosing the right iOS CI/CD platform
By the end of this presentation, you’ll be able to evaluate your current workflow, adopt the best CI/CD
practices, and ship your iOS applications faster.
2

1
The importance of
CI/CD for iOS
developers
CI/CD for iOS will save you days of
preparing app submissions, ﬁxing critical
bugs, and uploading screenshots to the App
Store. Automating these processes means
that any member of the team will be able to
release bug ﬁxes or updates.
The CI/CD can check in and check out the
source code so all members on your team
will be on the same page. Leading to better
communication, increased app development
quality, and more frequent releases.
3

The Real Value of DevOps
DevOps is a cultural change in the organization where the operations and development teams join forces
to continuously deliver high-quality software.
Because teams employing DevOps ideals are focused on delivering value to users as quickly and
efﬁciently as possible, continuous integration and delivery is a natural extension of their operations.
The end goal is to help iOS developers build and release apps at high velocity by deﬁning a process for
effective app delivery.
4

2
Principles of iOS
CI/CD
One of the most important aspects of
implementing CI/CD for iOS is learning
about the principles that can increase the
value of your current workﬂow.
5

Use Static Code Analysis
So that the build can fail early (in the event of serious coding errors), static code analysis should be the
absolute ﬁrst step in the build process. This way, you can ﬁx the issues as soon as they are found by the
server.
6

Keep the Code Deployable
Once the linter step is passed, we can move on to the building and compiling of the source code. The last
step in the app build process should be to generate the archive to be submitted to iTunes Connect. In the
case of iOS, it should be an IPA ﬁle.
7

Notify Your Team
Any developer can deploy any version of the app to any environment at a push of a button. Once the build
is finished, it’s important to send a notification to other developers with the status of the build. This can
be an email, Slack message, or similar notification service. The iOS CI/CD pipeline should trigger this
notification at the end of every build.
8

Design for Iterative Releases
Have a well-deﬁned pipeline that focuses on automated delivery. Implement static analytics on your
source code to detect issues or crashes (even in production).
9

3
The top beneﬁts of
CI/CD for iOS
Aside from making your previous iOS
development process more efﬁcient,
implementing a CI/CD pipeline helps your
team.
10

1. Build faster
A continuous and automated development cycle helps mobile development teams make high-value
releases faster.
11

2. Detect problems early
A continuous integration pipeline can run test suites on every code change. Thus, problems can be
spotted before they can reach production.
12

3. Provide effective feedback
In a continuous integration workflow, the entire team can view and monitor source code activity. When
new problems appear, the team members that introduced the failure are automatically notified.
13

4. Automate the testing process
Manually testing iOS apps on a simulator or multiple devices is a time-consuming process. In a CI/CD
workflow, the process is automatic and straightforward. Simply configure the devices and simulators into
the server workflow and let your pipeline do the work for you.
14

5. Build deployment logs
In a CI/CD pipeline, all build deployments are logged. This means that at any given time, you can identify
the exact point where your app failed.
15

4
Best practices to
remember for iOS
CI/CD
When implementing a CI/CD workﬂow for
iOS development, it’s vital you adhere to
standard best practices.
Why? The guidelines below are designed to
help you push high-quality code with every
release.
16

1. Keep your Pipeline Fast
Always improve the quality of your pipeline by inspecting its conﬁguration, improving build times,
removing any unnecessary code or assets, conﬁguring the right environments, and removing any
bottlenecks causing issues on the deploy process.
17

2. Run Code Analysis Early
Fail fast: Include unit tests and linters early in the pipeline.
18

3. Separate Build Configurations
Use profiles to separate build configurations. Internal and testing builds are different from the builds for
your users. By default, an iOS app includes Debug and Release build configurations. It makes sense to add
Test, Staging and Production builds.
19

4. Automate Your Builds
Compiling and building an iOS app takes a great deal of time. Using CI/CD workﬂow you can automate
the process and save time.
20

5. Deploy Only Through the Pipeline
The pipeline is conﬁgured to help and enforce best practices of CI/CD for your development cycle. Avoid
at all cost manual deploys.
Making your code run through your pipeline requires each change to conform with your code standards
and styles. This mechanism safeguards your codebase from untrusted code.
21

6. Maintain Similar Environments
If possible, try to maintain similar pipelines in all your environments. Changes that pass the requirements
of one environment should pass in another. This also includes feature branches.
22

7. Monitor the Pipeline
Apps are unpredictable. No matter how cool you think your code is, the app can fail for a lot of reasons.
Therefore, you’ll need to proactively monitor your deploys throughout the pipeline so you can catch
problems before they reach the App Store.
23

5
An iOS CI/CD
workﬂow example
After understanding and adopting essential
CI/CD principles, the next step is to set up
your pipeline.
One of the more painful parts of iOS
development is iterative releases. It’s
tedious and time-consuming.
The role of CI/CD here is to automate all of
these steps.
24

Before CI/CD
Before implementing CI/CD, a typical release to the App Store looks like this:
1. Check out source code from some remote repository (GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, etc.).
2. Do some static analysis of the code using SwiftLint, for example.
3. Compile and build your iOS app in a simulator or device to check that everything is running as
expected.
4. Run unit, UI or other kinds of tests.
5. Code signing and archive your app.
6. Submit your app to iTunes Connect.
7. Notify users about your release.
This process can be error-prone; you may experience merge conﬂicts and poor management of versions
(as this is done manually by each developer). 26

After CI/CD
Fortunately, we can improve it with automation. When we use an iOS CI/CD pipeline, our workﬂow looks
more like this:
1. Code the application changes with Xcode.
2. When the code is ready for integration, it automatically pushes to a Git repository.
3. Next, CI triggers the execution of test cases that will conﬁrm the code is ready for release.
4. Finally, the release pipeline triggers to deploy the archive produced in the CI stage, and a build is
released with TestFlight.
See how the iOS developer has far less to do with CI/CD? That’s the beauty of automation.
27

6
Getting Started
with iOS CI/CD
28

Getting started with CI/CD
To integrate CI/CD into your iOS development process, start by exploring what things can make your
team’s job easier. You need to understand and collect information about your current workflow and
provide feedback to the team until you have defined a process for your pipeline.
Using this information, your team can evaluate and define how to automate the current workflow to lead
to a better development lifecycle. Optimizing and automating the current process should be the priority.
29

Getting started with CI/CD
Ultimately, this approach increases transparency through all your team. When your iOS CI/CD pipeline is
set up, your entire team will know what’s going on with the builds and will receive the latest results of
tests, which means they can move on to resolving new issues.
This process allows developers to stay focused on writing code and observing the app’s behavior.
Meanwhile, product stakeholders have access to updated metrics. Code changes and tests are available
for review at any time.
The lesson here is that, as a faster feedback loop emerges, each member of the team can learn from each
other and take responsibility for the code that is shipped.
30

7
Choosing the Right
iOS CI/CD Platform
31

Self-hosted or Cloud-based?
Self-hosted CI/CD solutions require owning hardware and setting up infrastructure. Maintenance
becomes a big endeavor.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, on the other hand, offer cross-platform capabilities with zero
maintenance
These cloud-based CI/CD tools are easy to set up and all the hardware and software maintenance is
managed by the service provider. Developers can skip a lot of tedious or repetitive tasks, such as code
signing and publishing.
Cloud-based CI/CD also comes with a big advantage: it uniﬁes your team around a single platform,
mobilizing your iOS, Android and web developers within a consistent tool.
32

Summing Up A well-deﬁned process and the right CI/CD
tools will make your iOS development cycle
faster and more efﬁcient.
If you want to explore CI/CD for iOS in a
more hands-on way, check out our tutorial
on building, testing, & deploying an iOS App
with CI/CD.
Have any questions about this guide? Don’t
hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter
@semaphoreci.
33

Get in touch
More about Semaphore >> https://semaphoreci.com
Contact us >> https://semaphoreci.com/contact
Contact Sales: +1-415-992-7565
This guide was written by Amarildo Lucas and was originally published at
https://semaphoreci.com/ios-continuous-integration.
34

iOS CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Explained

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