Setting Xcode Build Settings Terminal

Question

I want to change build settings of a .xcodeproj without using Xcode IDE but through terminal commands (Codesigning Identity and Provisioning Profile to be exact).

I have searched all over but only found commands to build/archive the project from terminal, which I Do Not Want. What I want is to just change the settings, so that when I open the project in Xcode, it has the signing identities and provisioning profile set to what I had set in Terminal.

Xcodebuild command just builds/archives the project using what I pass as parameters, it doesn't set them as values in build settings of project.

Running xcodebuild -target <target-name> -showBuildSettings in terminal, where my project resides, gives me complete build settings of the project but I didn't get any method to set them.

Also I read here about using -setObject, but that also didn't help me as it also builds the code using parameters values I gave instead of actually setting them.

Currently using Xcode 6.3 and Xcode 7.

Any kind of help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

All Xcode settings is actually store in <project-name>.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj . It looks like

buildSettings = {
    CODE_SIGN_ENTITLEMENTS = "";
    CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY = "iPhone Developer";
    "CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY[sdk=iphoneos*]" = "iPhone Developer";

    ...

    PRODUCT_NAME = "$(TARGET_NAME)";
    PROVISIONING_PROFILE = "";
    SKIP_INSTALL = YES;
};

Code Signing Identity is controlled by CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY key and Provisioning Profile is controlled by PROVISIONING_PROFILE key.

The project.pbxproj is a text file that can be edited by traditional text processing tools in CLI, such as sed with

sed -ie 's/CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY = "iPhone Developer"/CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY = ""/g' <project-name>.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
sed -ie 's/PROVISIONING_PROFILE = ""/PROVISIONING_PROFILE = "1c28c979-6bef-4917-aa34-92aecd91315c";/g' <project-name>.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj

You can get the list of available Signing Identities with

security find-identity -v -p codesigning

For PROVISIONING_PROFILE, it's a UUID of provisioning file, it can be fetched with

grep -aA1 UUID /path/to/mobileprovision