Visual Studio Cordova iOS build server setup

Question

I have a problem with finding stuff about how to compile cordova apps from visual studio (desktop) on my macbook without parallels and similar things. I googled that stuff, but I found nothing relevant, or with parallels/vmware stuff.

I added some insight what I want to do in my comments, yet pasted it here:

nope, I mean, I have two devices: the desktop, where I have Windows 8.1 and a macbook pro mid 2012. And I want to (start a) build the cordova app from my desktop, but run it on my macbook (via iOS simulator). I don't want no dual booting, no virtualisation, just start the build from visual studio and finish the build on osx

Answer 1

Here are the steps:

Prerequisites

• Mac OS X Mavericks
• Xcode 5.1 and Xcode command line tools
• An active iOS Developer Program account with Apple, with iOS provisioning profile and signing identity configured in Xcode
• Node.js installed on the Mac

Installation

Run the following command from the Terminal app on your Mac:

sudo npm install -g vs-mda-remote

sudo npm install -g ios-sim

Setting Up the Remote Agent for Building

To start up the agent, run the following command:

vs-mda-remote --buildDir <server-build-directory> 

This will start the agent in build server mode. An additional command line parameter is required to start up the agent for personal use with the iOS Simulator that will be covered later.

Setting up the Remote Agent to Support Starting the iOS Simulator

If you are using the remote agent on a personal Mac (vs a shared Mac build server), you can configure the agent to support launching the iOS Simulator on your Mac from Visual Studio.

As mentioned previously, the ios-sim node module is required globally to enable starting up the iOS Simulator from Visual Studio.

The build server should then be started with the command line option --allowsEmulate=true:

vs-mda-remote --buildDir <server-build-directory> --allowsEmulate=true

When these requirements are met, the app can be deployed from Visual Studio to the simulator on the Mac running the agent.

For more details, the documentation contains a section called "Remote Build & Simulation Agent for iOS".