I'm following the React-Native documentation for building iOS for production, located here:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/running-on-device.html#building-your-app-for-production
I find these instructions very strange, because it tells you to manually edit files and xcode settings. It seems extremely annoying and error-prone having to do this every time you want to create a new release.
Is there a reasonable way to automate this or use some kind of conditional for dev/prod?
Related
I am using Xcode 9.4 and current react native version #0.54.4 I want to upgrade the version to 0.55.4.
As I upgrade my project using react-native-git-upgrade, I see some un merged conflicts in the project.pbxproj. Some of the settings are my own that are conflicting with the changes in the new version.
I tried all the possible ways in which I could resolve the conflicts. But still X-code shows the error could not load the project, and it does not allow me to build my project.
How do I understand what those conflicts are referring to and how can I safely resolve the conflicts?
Unfortunately there is no magic way to resolve conflicts. I wish there was. The file is managed by Xcode and from personal experience I have found that you can easily mess it up performing merges.
Git is definitely your best-friend. Make sure that before you start any merge you are on a new branch and fully committed so that if you mess-up you can easily get back to your original version.
What I usually do is keep the original version of the project.pbxproj and then make the changes manually in Xcode. I know this doesn't sound ideal but it does mean you should be able to open the project in Xcode, though your project may not run - just yet.
If you’re unclear about which version to keep, I would keep ours as that is the original version of your project.pbxproj. From the documentation:
You can think of "ours" as "your team" and "theirs" as "the React Native dev team".
Then I would make the changes manually as detailed below. As that will show their changes and the should hopefully not be that many.
To help me find the changes that I have to make I find that React Native Upgrade Helper is an invaluable resource. There you can find a git diff of any two versions of react-native that you choose. (This saves you having to create two projects and then compare them yourself, a big timesaver.)
Currently you are upgrading from 0.54.4 to 0.55.4 this link shows the diff between those versions
https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/?from=0.54.4&to=0.55.4
For additional help you could create a project in a specific react-native version, using the following will create a project for version 0.55.4.
react-native init newproject --version react-native#0.55.4
That way you can look inside the Xcode project to see what has been added, and where it was added from, as the git diff doesn't always tell where it came from.
I have never had much luck using react-native-git-upgrade and I have come to prefer doing it manually, as I have had much more success doing it that way.
After updating react native to version 0.55 from 0.51, everything seemed to function normally in the local mode. But the production build fails.
I fixed this by upgrading react native once again from 0.51, and keeping my changes instead of theirs almost all the time.
May be there should be more detailed explanation in the documentation regarding the kind of issues one run into, by picking the wrong changes.
I’m using “Mapbox-iOS-SDK” 3.0 via cocoapods and want implement pulsing effect for annotations:
https://github.com/TransitApp/SVPulsingAnnotationView
By this link was suggested update MGLMapView.mm file:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33598363/implement-pulse-effect-on-annotations-in-mapbox/33768054#33768054
But for now I don’t understand how I can run “mapbox-gl-native” project?
Here are the instructions for setting up a Mapbox iOS SDK build environment. Essentially, you clone the repo and run make iproj. Once you're ready to integrate the library into your own app, you'd run make ipackage and copy the resulting binary/etc in build/ios/dynamic/ to your project.
Beware: the mapbox-gl-native project is very complicated to build, the structure still in flux, and heavy development happening every day, so any instructions that I write here are likely to not be entirely useful in the mid-future.
Adding native views to a map view is not easily accomplished (yet), but you would start here and modify/subclass/imitate MGLUserLocationAnnotationView.
Every time I meteor build, I have to open XCode and do the following:
remove and add an item from "Link Binary With Libraries" (Facebook SDK)
add a URL Type (custom URL scheme for my app)
add a "Required device capabilities" to "Custom iOS Target Properties"
How can I edit my Meteor project to have these steps done automatically, and to auto add things to AndroidManifest.xml?
In some way use mobile-config.js or cordova-build-override?
I'm happy to see another guy who is trying to build a hybrid application using Meteor / extending a Meteor Cordova iOS app, since I'm facing the very same issues. So I'm very happy to share my experiences and approaches with you. :-)
So far, I ended up with the following approach:
I created a base template for my iOS app using meteor build (not meteor run ios-device, since I did not know if Meteor does some optimizations for production code).
Then, I copied the whole Xcode project under /platforms/ios to another loaction and used this new project as my "master" project from then on. This project is being enriched with native code, e.g. it also includes the Cocoa Pods I'm needing.
Of course, I also did not want to copy files each and every time I trigger a new Meteor build. At least, I would like to have the Staging/www folder updated, as this is happening quite frequently.
So my first (rather naive) approach was
delete the Staging/www folder in the master project
replace it with a relative link (using Xcode's linking functionality) to the Staging/www folder inside the .meteor/local/.../ios/ project
This approach did not work, since the shell script used in the Meteor Xcode project can't handle these links.
My second approach is to create a symlink on the filesystem level instead. This works as it should, and I'm able to build the project in Xcode as it should.
I could have followed the same approach for the Cordova plugins folder, but I've decided to replace the plugins manually in order to get a better control over them, even it means a bit more effort then.
Having the symlink in place also means that Xcode's version management (and also SVN which I am using for everything) will ignore everything below Staging/www, which is good in my opinion, because I'm already versioning the webapp code in the Meteor project itself.
BTW: I've started a discussion thread on hybrid mobile app on the Meteor forums as well, but so far it did not get too much attraction:
https://forums.meteor.com/t/building-a-hybrid-meteor-cordova-app-share-experiences/8212
Maybe we could follow up on Meteor-specific things there, to have the Meteor community participate in the discussion?
EDIT: I would also like to share an approach that failed completely, at least for me, maybe I was too dumb... Before I used Meteor's Xcode template as the starting point, I also tried it "the other way round", i.e. I started with my already existing Xcode app project and tried to include Meteor's / Cordova's part by hand. Using this approach, I never managed to set everything up correctly. I had lots of troubles and also had to tweak a lot of the compiler / linker flags to even get the code compiling. This grew me a lot of gray hairs. But even after I managed to get everything to compile, Meteor hang during startup - and I never figured out why.
One remaining problem I'm still facing is that Meteor's hot code push functionality seems to have some severe issues on iOS, that are also documented as GitHub issues. It can happen that the iOS app gets completely broken and needs to be reinstalled. I tried the mdg:reload-on-resume package, but this did not work as it should and made things even worse. As far as I can tell from the GitHub discussions, one should better disable hot code push until the Meteor team has addressed these issues. Breaking the app completely due to code pushes is not what my users would expect.
Unfortunately plist values (and assumably AndroidManifest.xml as well) can only be changed by a plugin:
Add entry to iOS .plist file via Cordova config.xml
I am rebuilding an App and at the same time paring it down of unnecessary code and it contains "required frameworks" that I think were left over from copying a previous app shell for building this app. How can I determine if a framework is actually needed. I thought I could just leave them off and build the app and then add them as required to let it build successfully but in the past that has not worked well to my surprise as I have built and tested a previous App without any additional frameworks added and the App built and ran just fine on simulators and actually devices only to find out at submission time I forgot to add the frameworks before submitting it.
I am trying to be proactive and only put in the ones I need. Some, like the MediaPlayer are definitely not needed and I can eliminate them already but some are harder to determine.
Curious if there was an easy way to figure this out.
I am using cordova-brunch in a project and I would really like to not have to re-run the cake build:ios:dev command each time I modify the JavaScript/CoffeScript source. Even more since I usually have to also make changes in the iOS Objective-C code for my hybrid app and I generally rebuild the App from XCode forgetting to rebuild the JS/CS part.
The behaviour is identical for Chapless Brunch and Cider Brunch, but I still don't get what prevents a cake watch:ios:dev functionality. The available cake watch:cordova:dev doesn't solve the problem.