We’ve been adding some Cordova-based builds into our system, and the first iOS build kept stalling during the build. After some troubleshooting and Googling I came across this fantastic article: Automating Cordova Workflow: xcodebuild Hangs During iOS Build. What Simon describes is exactly the effect we were observing, and his solution solved the problem. What is happening is Cordova is not creating the Xcode project correctly, it’s missing the schemes. Opening Xcode on the server fixes this, as does the scripted solution presented by Simon.
But even better than fixing our current problem with Cordova, one of the commenters solved another mystery which I’ve encountered for a long time in Jenkins iOS builds. The first time a project is built using Jenkins, it never seems to work. But if you remote into the server and just open the project using Xcode, it magically starts working after that. Turns out the schemes are stored in xcuserdata, which we are keeping out of source control with .gitignore. Opening the IDE on the server causes the schemes to be created. The real solution is to set the schemes to shared in Xcode. Open the Product menu in Xcode, choose Scheme then Edit Scheme:
Click the Shared checkbox then check in the project. The schemes will now be part of the build and it won’t hang mysteriously any more.
