Swift

A dependency mirror refers to an alternate source location which exactly replicates the contents of the original source. [1] I often end up in the same situation: I need to tweak an internal package that a project depends on. The usual options are: Drag and drop the repo into Xcode (Xcode replaces the remote dependency with the local copy) Change Package.swift to a local path dependency Both work, but I prefer a CLI-only workflow. Turns out SPM has a cleaner alternative: dependency mirroring! ...

Need your Alfred snippets on iPhone and iPad? Alfred Snippet Converter now supports zip archives, drag & drop, and batch conversion of multiple collections. What’s New Zip Archive Support - Convert collections directly after exporting from Alfred without manual extraction. Drag & Drop - Simply drag your collection files onto the app window. Batch Processing - Convert all your Alfred snippet collections in one operation. The tool converts Alfred snippets into macOS text replacements, which sync across all your Apple devices via iCloud. Read the full setup guide in Alfred Snippets on iOS. ...

A few months ago, I decided to try Xcode’s new buildable folders feature in my project. However, right after converting all my groups to folders, I discovered that CocoaPods had stopped working. Attempting to install project dependencies resulted in the following error: $ pod install ❌ ArgumentError - [Xcodeproj] Unable to find compatibility version string for object version `70`. At the time, I updated CocoaPods to the latest version, confirmed my project format was set to the latest Xcode version (16.3), and tried again. When the issue persisted, I assumed CocoaPods was incompatible with buildable folders and that I would need to migrate to Swift Package Manager (SPM) to use them. This conclusion seemed to be confirmed by several closed GitHub issues where the suggested workaround was to manually convert folders back to groups. ...

I recently needed to add Swift Package Manager support to a legacy package that one of my projects was using. The package was originally distributed with CocoaPods. The primary reason for migrating from CocoaPods to SPM is that CocoaPods entered maintenance mode a few months ago. Removing it will future-proof our projects and allow us to use the latest features, such as the buildable folders introduced in Xcode 16. Assumptions Since this was an internal package, I did not need to maintain CocoaPods support. The goal was to replace it entirely with SPM. It is certainly possible to keep both, but that would require some additional work. The project I was working on is considered legacy; no one has touched it in about six years. Once this task is complete, I hope no one will need to update it for another half-dozen years. This allowed me to take some shortcuts, like integrating a third-party dependency directly into the codebase instead of spending time updating it to the latest version. All internal dependencies of your framework already support SPM. With that said, let’s get started. ...

My current project has a single target and multiple schemes. Each scheme represents the same app for different countries/regions. It’s essentially the same application with minor adjustments made for each of the supported jurisdictions. In Xcode projects, you define supported languages at the project level (not scheme level). Because of this structure, each app variant inherits the same language settings. My task was to force each app variant to support only the language for the region it was released in. The French app should only support French, no matter what the user’s device language is set to, and so on. This decision was made because large portions of the app are web-based and only supported a single language. ...

I’ve noticed that the SwiftLint plugin can add up to 30 seconds to incremental build times. In my case, it nearly doubled the average incremental build time! Since there’s no straightforward way to disable SwiftLint across all local packages in a project, I decided on the simplest solution: automating the process of temporarily commenting out SwiftLint from the dependencies list. In my projects, to ensure the SwiftLint plugin is automatically added to all package targets, I append the following code to each Swift package manifest: ...

In this article, I’ll show you how to access a web page’s content, alter it using JavaScript, and display it using your Safari extension’s UI. Specifically, I’ll demonstrate how to display an article’s content in a popover. I often use Large Language Models (LLMs) to summarize articles when I’m unsure if they’re worth reading. Without the extension we’re about to build, I’d need to manually trigger Safari’s reader mode (⌘ + ⇧ + R), copy all content, and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT. This extension is a handy tool that reduces friction! ...

When adding a local Swift package to your Xcode project, you might encounter the following error: Missing package product `PACKAGE_NAME` The issue often occurs when the package you’re trying to add is already open in Xcode. To resolve: Close the package in Xcode. Close your main project. Reopen your main project. I’m not sure what might be causing this issue or why reopening the project is required (a clean build won’t do). ...

In my current role, we have around 30 projects distributed across roughly 20 different repositories. Most of them are Swift packages for various features used in our apps. This setup requires me to frequently switch between multiple projects. Just a few days ago, I was working on the login flow. This involved modifying two Swift packages and one Xcode project. Remembering whether a given project is a Swift package, a workspace (.xcworkspace), or a standard project (.xcodeproj) is exhausting. This adds unnecessary complexity and slows down the workflow. It would be better if we had a single command to open all of them at once. Here’s a script that does just that: ...

Imagine you’re working on Project A, which relies on Package B, a remote Swift package. To incorporate modifications in B and assess their impact on A, the standard approach requires committing and pushing the changes in B, updating B’s version in A, and then rebuilding A to observe the outcomes. This method is slow and cumbersome. There must be a better way! Project A | └──> Swift Package B To speed up and improve the workflow, you can convert the remote dependency B to a local one. This method works whether Project A is a Swift package or an Xcode project (xcodeproj or xcworkspace). ...

A few months ago, I wrote about Alfred Snippets on iOS. In that article, I described the manual process of converting Alfred text snippets into macOS text replacements. Since then, I’ve had time to refine this project and add some new features. You can download the final Command Line Interface (CLI) or the macOS app from this link. Next on my list is the complete automation of the process of synchronizing Alfred text snippets with macOS text replacements. I’m not sure if it’s even possible, but there’s only one way to find out. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will take me less time than it did before. ...

How to automate adding plugins to all of your existing (and future) targets in a Swift package TL;DR package.targets = package.targets.map { target in var plugins = target.plugins ?? [] plugins.append(.plugin(name: "SwiftLintPlugin", package: "SwiftLint")) target.plugins = plugins return target } The Problem Last month, I was tasked with adding SwiftFormat and SwiftLint to one of the projects my team maintains. The project is medium-sized and uses Swift Package Manager (SPM) for modularization. It has a separate SPM package for each module. For example: ...

How to use GitLab’s built-in test coverage report tool for pure Swift packages? Some test coverage report generation tools do not support “pure” Swift packages. One example is Slather. By pure, I’m referring to packages that contain only the Package.swift file, without any .xcodeproj or .xcworkspace files. One solution to this problem was to generate a project file for a Swift package on the fly using Fastlane. This solution has one limitation: it’s not possible to generate a project file for a Swift package that contains any resources. When you try doing so, you’ll see Type 'Bundle' has no member “module” error when building. ...

Development Assets in Xcode that allow developers to provide test data to use within SwiftUI previews and other code during development. Assets marked for development will only be included in debug builds and removed once you create an archive of your app. This solution is preferred to having larger assets in the production binary size. Developers can add different types of data as Development Assets, such as JSON files for mocked network requests, images to use in SwiftUI previews, Core Data sample databases, and Swift files representing mocked or sample data. Swift files are added differently because they use the dead code stripper to avoid the compiler from failing during archiving. ...

After SPM asset support has been added to Xcode 12, there is no reason not to use modularization in your iOS projects. It brings value no matter the project and team size. However, after some time, you might encounter problems like increased complexity, difficulty with integration testing, or code duplication. Today we’ll focus on the last one, specifically, testing doubles duplication. Let’s jump in! Introduction When saying “module” I’m always referring to a group of related targets. One example would be DomainModels and DomainModelsTests. The DomainModels target stores the implementation, while DomainModelsTests has unit tests code. ...

Swift Package Manager (SPM) is a powerful tool for modularizing your code and managing dependencies in your projects. If you’re working on a project that uses SPM for modularization, you may need to add internal dependencies to connect different parts of your codebase. In this article, we’ll go over how to add internal dependencies in SPM and configure your Package.swift file to properly connect them. Assumptions Before we get started, let’s make a few assumptions about your project and its structure: ...

Context I’m currently developing a chat-based app that requires the implementation of coping messages. Essentially, when a user long-presses a message bubble, an edit menu will appear with the option to “Copy.” This feature is a common element across most chat applications. For the purpose of this article, let’s assume that all message bubbles are constructed using a subclass of UITextView called MessageTextView. To make the “Copy” option appear on a long-press gesture, we’ll first need to add the appropriate gesture recognizer: ...