Best build dir location to use in Xcode

Question

I'm consolidating my Xcode/TextMate setup and is interested in where you put your build dir.

Some years ago I started out having the build dir in the same dir as my xcodeproj file. However it became a mess when my project became a multi project with a applications and frameworks and tests, so I started using ../build as the build dir, so that all the sub projects used the same dir. However Spotlight is indexing this build dir and TextMate's global find is unusable when there is a build dir in the project.

I'm thinking either using ~/.build or /build as Xcode's build dir.

What build dir do you use and why?

Answer 1

If you let Xcode create the build directory then it shouldn't get indexed by Spotlight (Xcode sets an extended attribute on the directory specifically to make this happen). If it's a build directory from an old project that been upgraded, or a build directory that you created manually, then this won't be the case and it will get indexed. You can either add this attribute manually if it's missing, or perhaps delete the build directory and let Xcode re-create it. Once you have this sorted out you should be good to go with your common build folder scheme.

The extended attribute is com.apple.XcodeGenerated.