Is there a method for sharing and syncing the iOS simulator Applications folder

Question

Our sales team often needs to give demos of apps currently in development. We've used a variety of methods to get them installed on their laptops but everything has been very manual.

The initial method we were using had us downloading the source code and compiling each and every project for each and every salesman. Very time consuming and annoying.

Then we got a little smarter and realized that we could copy out the Applications folder for the iOS simulator and just past that over the iOS simulator's Applications folder on each salesman's laptop. Much better, but still the manual part of copying them all over to each laptop.

So I started poking around about some folder syncing options for macs and came across this technique http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWoXPWlu_Dk

Very awesome and seemed to meet my need exactly. I had one central shared folder I could throw new iOS applications into and then the salesmen's laptops would automagically sync with that applications folder and new apps would just appear with no need to ever have their laptops here.

Unfortunately, the iOS simulator does not seem to be recognizing the Applications folder when it's a symbolic link or alias. Is there some Mac magic that could make this work? (I'm a Windows guy normally, just recently been working in the iOS world, so there could be something basic I'm missing here).

I'd love to have the Applications folder /Application Support/iPhone Simulator/5.1/Applications be a shared folder that syncs automatically for them, grabbing any new applications we have ready for demos (and getting them updates to old ones). Just seems like a nice smooth way to get them early builds.

We've used services like TestFlight for the actual devices and that's a great option for that, but when they don't have a device handy or are just blasting through demos on their laptops we'd love to have a nice easy process for keeping them up to date with new builds for their simulator install.

Answer 1

First a bit of background, you don't really need this, but I like teaching :).

On Unix, and now MacOS, there are two basic kinds of links. 'normal' links, and symbolic links. Alias, on windows, unix and mac are a kind of symbolic link: the link contains a reference to the original file. Normal, or hard links create a second directory entry that points to the data, if you delete the original file, the OS knows that there is still another entry pointing to it, so it only actually deletes the file (or directory) when all hard links have been removed. The disadvantage of hard links is that they have to be on the same file system, so that the file system can keep count of how many hard links there are.

OK, I've just installed Dropbox, and it seems that it creates a real folder in the user's home directory, so unless you're a complicated disk partitioning scheme, or file vault 1, where the user's home directory is actually an encrypted disk image, you can use a hard link. It also means that you don't need to copy or sync, as Dropbox is already doing that.

One thing not corrected, but didn't actually point out is that in your post, you seem to be copying to /Application Support, not ~/Library/Application Support or /Library/Application Support. Since you've got the basic scheme working without dropbox, I'll assume that is a typo.

Before I give you the commands, you might want to delete the old iPhone Simulator Applications directory with the Finder, instead of using the rm command, as the rm command is potentially very destructive.

OK, finally, the commands to do the linking; the quotes are important whenever filenames contain spaces. This example is for ~/Library

rm  -rf "~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/5.1/Applications"

ln "~/Dropbox/Simulator Applications" "~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/5.1/Applications"

This should work, you can stop reading now, the rest is just more education :)

Tilde (~) is a short cut for the users home directory. Use the commands without this to work on /Library instead.

If you want to be sure you've got the exact path, you can drag files and folders from a finder window into the terminal, the path gets pasted instead of the file.

If you're messing with stuff in the root filesystem, you might need superuser rights. If you are logged in with an admin account, you can run single commands with superuser access as follows.

sudo ln  "/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator" fred

The shell asks for your password, and then runs the command for you as superuser. sudo remembers the authorization for a few minutes, then you have to authenticate again.