How would you automate multiple builds for an iPhone application?

Question

I am aware of the paid vs. free discussion, but I have a couple extra issues that aren't covered there:

Say I've written an iPhone app that lets you read a newspaper. I want to build four copies of the app, one for each individual newspaper that can be read, so I have four distinct apps, each reading a different newspaper.

Here's the two catches that the other thread doesn't cover:

1. Which paper the app reads is defined in the main plist, not in code, so I'm not sure the preprocessor macro tricks apply. If they do, how do you incorporate them into a plist file?

2. I want to build all four versions of the app at once; I don't want to have to select each target in turn and repeat the process four times. I want a single "makefile" (if you will) that builds them all, and preferably also deploys them simulator so when I start it up I can test them all in a single session.

Do such facilities exist in XCode? If not, what external tools might you recommend?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can easily knock together a bash script that uses the xcodebuild command line tool to do builds from a particular xcode project.

The xcodebuild tool takes a few arguments, mainly the xcode project file, the target you wish to build and the configuration.

Using that info you can script several builds from targets in your project file without having to do it manually.