CI for iOS with Bitbucket Pipelines

3 min readJan 31, 2023

How to add continues integration for iOS and don’t dead trying 🚀

Requirements

Runner machine, run

You can have a local project Runner or a workspace runner, I recommend the workspace became the runner will only make the connection between the bitbucket and the machine.

Installing the runner 🏃🏼‍♂️

Go to workspace settings > workspace runners
Click on Add Runner
Select MacOS on system and architecture

Download the runner zip

curl https://product-downloads.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/pipelines/atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner-1.397.tar.gz --output atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner.tar.gz

Extract the file

mkdir atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner && tar -xzvf atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner.tar.gz -C atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner

Launch the runner and don’t close the terminal.

cd atlassian-bitbucket-pipelines-runner/bin

./start.sh //command indicated on the documentation

If everything goes well you will see

Apple things 🧑🏼‍💻

Save the Team ID, you can obtain it on Apple develop > Account > Membership details.

Then take the provision profile of your app and add it to the machine that will be used for CI

Firebase Distribution 🔥

First of all enable the firebase app distribution.
Execute the firebase login:ci and save the token, if you don’t have install the Firebase CLI, install it.
Save the application ID

Prepare the project 🏗

Create a folder ci that it will contains

groups.txt → Here write the Firebase distributions groups.
releasenotes.txt → Here write the app release notes.
testers.txt → Here write the testers mails.
profile → Here we will create the export.plist

Export.plist

This file we will use to generate the IPA.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>method</key>
    <string>enterprise</string>
    <key>teamID</key>
    <string>Insert teamID</string>
    <key>uploadBitcode</key>
    <false/>
    <key>compileBitcode</key>
    <true/>
    <key>uploadSymbols</key>
    <true/>
    <key>signingStyle</key>
    <string>manual</string>
    <key>signingCertificate</key>
    <string>Apple Distribution</string>
    <key>provisioningProfiles</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Insert the package name like com.example.example</key>
        <string>Insert the provision profile name</string>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Every app have her own export.plist

Bitbucket Pipeline

This is the last step of our beautiful path, so let’s go!

Edit your bitbucket-pipelines.yml to something like:

pipelines:
  custom:
    deploy_firebase_version:
      - step:
          runs-on:
            - self.hosted
            - macos
          script:
            - pod install
            - xcodebuild -workspace YOUR-APP-WORKSPACE.xcworkspace -scheme YOUR-SCHEME -archivePath build/version/app.xcarchive archive
            - xcodebuild -exportArchive -archivePath build/version/app.xcarchive -exportPath build/version -exportOptionsPlist ci/profile/export.plist
            - firebase appdistribution:distribute IPA-PATH --app FIREBASE-APPLICATION-ID --release-notes-file ci/releasenote.txt --groups-file ci/groups.txt  --testers-file ci/testers.txt --token FIREBASE-TOKEN

Launch your pipeline

Project > Pipelines > Run Pipeline