Automated builds in monotouch

Question

I am currently trying to implement a one-click build solution (without having to start the monodevelop IDE) for my monotouch projects, where i could specify provisioning profiles and code signing certificates. I searched popular build tools like nant, ant and maven, but none seems to support monotouch. Has anyone tried something similar ?

Answer 1

I've gotten it work with Jenkins (aka Hudson).

You basically setup a Jenkins server, and setup your Mac as a "slave" build server. (I used a JNLP slave).

From there you can run any command line you want in the build, so you merely have to run mdtool with some arguments, like so:

/Applications/MonoDevelop.app/Contents/MacOS/mdtool -v build "--configuration:Release|iPhone" "Path/To/YourSolution.sln"

One thing to worry about is that to sign an iOS app, the slave process must run under your user. So you can't really create a Mac daemon for it, you'll have to run the slave process in startup for your user and minimize it, which is kind of annoying.