How can I reset the iOS Simulator from the command line?

Question

I need to reset the iPhone Simulator a lot, and haven't found a way to do it without using the mouse. It's a small thing, but I'm really sick of doing it and would love to have a way to do this using a keyboard shortcut.

Even better would be a way to reset it from the command line, so I could build a reset into a deploy script.

I am not very familiar with iOS or MacOS.

Answer 1

Just run this in the terminal:

xcrun simctl shutdown all && xcrun simctl erase all 

Another approach suggested by @txulu, before erasing the simulator kill the process:

killall "Simulator" 2> /dev/null; xcrun simctl erase all 

Answer 2

In Xcode 6, DO NOT JUST DELETE THE FOLDER FOR THE SIMULATOR! It WILL screw things up, and it WILL cause you a headache.

In Xcode 6, there's actually a tool to control the simulator from the command line.

Make sure your command line settings are set to Xcode 6

xcrun simctl 

In Xcode 6, each device has a GUID/UUID associated to it, to reset a specific device, you need the GUID for it.

The command

xcrun simctl list 

will show you all of the devices you have set up. The output will look like this:

== Devices == -- iOS 7.0 -- iPhone 4s (F77DC0AE-6A6D-4D99-9936-F9DB07BBAA82) (Shutdown) iPhone 5 (5B78FC0D-0034-4134-8B1F-19FD0EC9D581) (Shutdown) iPhone 5s (569E5910-E32D-40E2-811F-D2E8F04EA4EF) (Shutdown) iPad 2 (451DBBD8-A387-4E77-89BF-2B3CD45B4772) (Shutdown) iPad Retina (2C58366B-5B60-4687-8031-6C67383D793F) (Shutdown) iPad Air (50E03D3B-3456-4C49-85AD-60B3AFE4918B) (Shutdown) -- iOS 7.1 -- -- iOS 8.0 -- iPhone 4s (27818821-A0BB-496E-A956-EF876FB514C2) (Shutdown) iPhone 5 (6FBAA7E2-857C-432A-BD03-980D762DA9D2) (Shutdown) iPhone 5s (7675C82B-DE49-45EB-A28D-1175376AEEE9) (Shutdown) iPad 2 (836E7C89-B9D6-4CC5-86DE-B18BA8600E7B) (Shutdown) iPad Retina (EFDD043D-2725-47DC-A3FF-C984F839A631) (Shutdown) iPad Air (9079AD6C-E74D-4D5F-9A0F-4933498B852E) (Shutdown) Resizable iPhone (943CFEDE-A03C-4298-93E3-40D0713652CB) (Shutdown) Resizable iPad (DBA71CA5-6426-484B-8E9B-13FCB3B27DEB) (Shutdown) 

Just copy the GUID from inside the parentheses, and run xcrun simctl erase

for example,

xcrun simctl erase 5B78FC0D-0034-4134-8B1F-19FD0EC9D581 

would erase the iOS 7.0, iPhone 5 device