Running clang static checker at project level (iOS app) rather than file by file (xcodebuild) - ios

Question

After solving this Omitted code blocks from clang AST for ObjectiveC, I've tried it on a small Objective C .m file along with an appropriate compile_commands.json and it works properly and I get the entire syntax tree.
Now I'm trying to see if it's possible to run it on the entire xcodebuild
[
{
"directory" : "/Users/xx/Desktop/iOSApplication",
"command" : "xcodebuild clean build CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY=\"\" CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO -project /Users/xx/Desktop/iOSApplication/iOSApplication.xcodeproj/",
"file" : "iOSApplication.xcodeproj"
}
]
When I tried to then run clang-check -ast-dump /Users/xx/Desktop/iOSApplication/iOSApplication.xcodeproj it gives me the errors error: unknown argument: '-project' and error: unable to handle compilation, expected exactly one compiler job in ''
Is it actually possible to run the AST based checker on the entire xcodeproject? Or how should I go about compiling the files 1 at a time?

Answer 1

I've managed to generate the compile_commands.json by following this guide here http://docs.oclint.org/en/stable/guide/xcodebuild.html
However, I'd still like to be able to run my RecursiveASTVisitor on the entire projects. Or alternatively, pass in the xcode project and enumerate all the source files would probably work too.
Anyone has ideas how to go about passing entire xcodebuild project as parameter for RecursiveASTVisitor?
Right now I'm running my ASTVisitor like this ./MyASTChecker ~/Desktop/directory/sample1.m but I'd like to make it do something like ./MyASTChecker ~/Desktop/directory/sampleproject.xcodeproj

Answer 2

The way I do it is at compile time using scan-build. This works for me with cmake/make based projects.
scan-build --use-analyzer=clang -enable-checker <checker_name> make
This will read the makefile and build everything in there while running the specified checker on each file as it's compiled. If you only want to build with some flags or a specific target, you can do this:
scan-build --use-analyzer=clang -enable-checker <checker_name> make <build_options>
If you instead have a cmake based project. You might first want to generate a makefile in a build directory. I do this for that:
cmake <path_to_cmakelists> -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=c++-analyzer -DCMAKE_CC_COMPILER=ccc-analyzer
This followed by scan-build from above will compile and run checker on the source files while each file is being compiled.
I have only tried this with CMAKE / MAKE but should work with xcode like this:
scan-build --use-analyzer=clang -enable-checker <checker_name> xcodebuild
and with build options
scan-build --use-analyzer=clang -enable-checker <checker_name> xcodebuild <build_options>
You can read more about scan-build here