Contributing

xcbuild actively welcomes contributions from the community. If you run into problems, please open an issue. Pull requests are great too!

Getting Started

To learn about xcbuild, start with the techincal overview below. Each of the components of xcbuild is documented in the Headers directory, with both module and API documentation available.

If you're new to xcbuild, we have a list of issues designed for new contributors to get started in the codebase. We're always happy to help people working on these issues and learning about xcbuild.

Overview

To make xcbuild useful as more than just a build tool, it's built as a collection of libraries. Each of these libraries has its headers under Headers and PrivateHeaders, source code under Sources, and unit tests under Tests. Under Tools are the executables that use the xcbuild libraries, including xcbuild itself.

Shared components:

ext: Standard library extensions from the future.
plist: Reader, writer, and model for ASCII, binary, and XML property lists.
libutil: Common utilities and platform abstractions.
process: Process launching and parameter abstraction.
graphics: Image loading, color conversion, and serialization.

Build components:

ninja: Generator for Ninja build files.
dependency: Parse dependency info from various tools.
pbxsetting: Build setting parsing, levels, and resolution.
xcsdk: Loads the available platforms, SDKs, and toolchains in a developer root.
pbxspec: Parses available build settings, tools, and file types into strongly-typed structures.
pbxproj: Parses project files into strongly-typed structures.
xcworkspace: Parses workspaces into strongly-typed structures.
xcscheme: Parses schemes into strongly-typed structures.
builtin: Built-in tools used for building, like file copying and validation.
pbxbuild: Performs the build. Made up of a number of subcomponents:
- Build: Top-level context for the scheme, targets, and action for a build.
- Target: Creates the build environment and settings for each target.
- Phase: Implementations for the various build phases (compile, link, copy, etc).
- Tool: Tool implementations for generating command line invocations.
xcformatter: Build log formatting styles.
xcexecution: Build execution engines.
xcdriver: Parses command line options and drives the build.

Asset components:

xcassets: Parses asset catalogs into strongly-typed structures.
libbom: Reads and writes standard BOM archives.
libcar: Reads and writes asset archives archives within a BOM.
acdriver: Parses command line options and compiles asset catalogs.

Style

C++ can be complex, so xcbuild tries to stick with a reasonable subset modeled after Swift, Rust, and other modern langages. Prefer immutable structures and classes. Prefer passing by const reference, and avoid non-const references. Templates are avoided when possible. Exceptions and RTTI are not used.

Contributor License Agreement ("CLA")

In order to accept your pull request, we need you to submit a CLA. You only need to do this once to work on any of Facebook's open source projects.

Code of Conduct

This project adheres to the Open Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to honor this code.

License

By contributing to xcbuild you agree that your contributions will be licensed under its BSD license.

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