xcodebuild archive fails, xcode archive succeeds

Question

I am attempting to automate the submission process to iTunesConnect using a shell script and the command line tools from Xcode. So far, I have managed to achieve every step in the process bar one: archive.

The code from the script:

echo "Attempting to build target: ${TARGET_PRODUCT}"
cd $ENGINE_PATH
# Clean
/usr/bin/xcodebuild clean -project projName.xcodeproj -target "${TARGET_PRODUCT}" -configuration Release
# Build and Archive
/usr/bin/xcodebuild archive -project projName.xcodeproj -scheme "${TARGET_PRODUCT}" -configuration Release -archivePath "${TARGET_PRODUCT}".xcarchive

So far, the archive command has been unable to create an archive successfully. The only output from this command is:** ARCHIVE FAILED **.
If I just try to build, rather than archive, I get: ** BUILD SUCCEEDED **

The archive does produce a file at the expected location and 'Show Package Contents' expands to show a directory structure identical to archives produced within Xcode with one exception, the archive created within Xcode includes an additional folder called SCMBlueprint.

I've seen on other forum posts that issues with archiving are often due to Code Sign or Provisioning Profile issues. However, I'm not convinced this is an issue in this case, as during the build and archiving process the Code Sign Identity and Provisioning Profiles used are output in the console. My failed archiving is using the same Code Sign Identity and Provisioning Profile that successful builds are using. In addition, I produced an archive using Xcode and looked within that archive for the embedded.mobileprovision file. I compared this to the failed archive generated by xcodebuild and could see that they are identical.

I've looked elsewhere online for any suggestions for what is causing the archiving by xcodebuild to fail, but so far, I am stumped! Any help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

Please check if you do not have any errors during archive process. Also please compare the logs between Xcode and command line output, it may help you understanding on which step compilation fails.

I had the same issue. Archive was failing without any specific reason, while .xcarchive was produced. I looked at build logs from xcode noticed that it finished with Build finished with errors message. Despite this error organizer was showing archive and I was able to export IPA from it.

When I reviewed that, I found out there was an archive error caused by broken PNG file, which couldn't be compressed during archive process. Error was non fatal, hence archive was being produced anyway. When I fixed PNG file everything started compiling smoothly without any issues.

Answer 2

This just happened to me, and it was for a different issues than with PNGs (maybe what follows is just the more general case though): I had a custom build phase which was outputting errors to stderr, but the build phase wasn't returning an exit code different from 0 in this case (using xcodebuild from Xcode 9.3 (9E145)).
The build phase was similar to:

find "${SRCROOT}/Directory" -print0 | <...>

Where ${SRCROOT}/Directory was renamed, and so find would output an error without failing the script: the build log would contain Command /bin/sh emitted errors but did not return a nonzero exit code to indicate failure right after executing the build phase.

While Xcode itself has no issues with it, xcodebuild would simply fail with **ARCHIVE FAILED** at the end, right after touching the DSYM.

The fix was to make sure that if a build phase outputs to stderr, the build phase correctly explicitely returns an exit code different from 0 (like 1). In my case, changing the path referenced in find fixed the issue.