OSX/Bash - detecting build failure

Question

Using Xcodebuild directly from bash, how would one detect a failure? the exit code is always 0 regardless. I realize there's an "FAILED" or "SUCCEEDED" textural output, but isn't there a more elegant way?

Also, I sometimes use "make" (especially with my Qt based builds). Is there a way to detect make has failed from the build script?

Answer 1

xcodebuild always returns 0 even when the build fails. To detect errors, you could use a script like this:

build_errors_file=build_errors.log

# Pipe errors to file
xcodebuild 2>$build_errors_file

errors=`grep -wc "The following build commands failed" $build_errors_file`
if [ "$errors" != "0" ]
then
    echo "BUILD FAILED. Error Log:"
    cat $build_errors_file
    rm $build_errors_file
    exit 1
fi
rm $build_errors_file

# ... continue

I verified that ** BUILD FAILED ** will not be printed when running xcodebuild with the archive option, so it seems that the string to look for is 'The following build commands failed'.

Answer 2

Maybe it depends on the version of Xcode or possibly how it fails. This is what I get when I check $? after some include files can't be found:

davidb@DavidBs-Mobile-Macintosh:~/Source/icanvas/iCanvas-project (release/icanvas-1.9 %) $ xcodebuild
...
/Users/davidb/Source/icanvas/iCanvas-project/iCanvas-target/iPhone/ConversationViewController.m:21:9: fatal error: 'CanvasKit/CKActionSheetWithBlocks.h' file not found
#import "CanvasKit/CKActionSheetWithBlocks.h"
        ^
1 error generated.
...
** BUILD FAILED **
...
(5 failures)
davidb@DavidBs-Mobile-Macintosh:~/Source/icanvas/iCanvas-project (release/icanvas-1.9 %) $ echo $?
65