How to specify your Xcode version on Appveyor

Hello ! I’m Xavier Jouvenot and in this small post, I am going to explain how to specify your Xcode version on Appveyor.

Self promotion: You can find other articles on computer science and programming on my website 😉

Problematic

If you have CI/CD processes or if you want to create some for your project, then it may be wise to make sure that you can always compile your project using the same version of Xcode as the one you are using on your machine, or the one used by your development team.

Another use case where specifying a version of Xcode can be very useful, is to upgrade the version you, and/or your dev team, are actually using. Indeed, by specifying a newer version of Xcode in your CI/CD configuration, you can make sure everything works with the new version before asking everybody to upgrade the version of Xcode on their machine, and have a smooth transition.

Solution

The short answer, for the people who don’t want to read through the entire article (I know you do that! I do it too 😆) is to insert the following setup in your Appveyor process, before trying to compile anything:

build_script:
  - sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode-<version_number>.app

So, for example, if you want to select the version 13.1 of Xcode on Appveyor, then, it would look like that:

build_script:
  - sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode-13.1.app

If you are not sure about the version of Xcode you are actually using on Appveyor, you can always look to the documentation, or you can add the following step to you process and see the information directly in Appveyor:

build_script:
  - sudo xcode-select -p

Diving deeper with concrete examples

To make sure that, even in the future, you have working examples to look at, I have made a GitHub repository with an Appveyor process for each version of Xcode present on each OSX virtual environment available.

In the appveyor.yml file at the root of the repository, you will see jobs set up for each OSX environment using a matrix, running a shell script in a dedicated folder which selects each version of XCode available and print it once it has been selected.