Build, Test, & Deploy an iOS App with Github Actions (Part1)

In his article, you'll learn how to automate the process of deploying your builds to testers using TestFlight.

The Goal

We want to:

1. automatically run Unit Tests for each pull request
2. deploy a new build to TestFlight whenever a pull request is merged

Initial setup

Now, let's go to Visual Studio Code and create our first workflow YAML file:

Create .github/workflows/pullRequest.yml file. I will just copy and paste the following to save time, but we'll go over it:

name: Pull Request

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: macos-11
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Cancel Previous Runs
        uses: styfle/cancel-workflow-action@0.9.1
        with:
          access_token: ${{ github.token }}

      - name: Swift Packages Cache
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        id: cache
        with:
          path: |
            Build/SourcePackages
            Build/Build/Products
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-deps-v1-${{ hashFiles('BILDsolid.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcshareddata/swiftpm/Package.resolved') }}
          restore-keys: ${{ runner.os }}-deps-v1-
 
      - name: Select Xcode
        run: sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode_13.0.app && /usr/bin/xcodebuild -version

      - name: Run tests
        run: xcodebuild test -scheme MyProjectName -project MyProjectName.xcodeproj -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 12,OS=15.0' | xcpretty && exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}
        

on: We describe when we want to run the workflow, or what will trigger it. In our case, it's a pull request against the main branch. workflow_dispatch means that we want to be able to trigger the workflow manually on Github.

jobs: Now we actually start to describe what we want to do. We have the first and the only job called test (can be named anything else). runs-on: macos-11 - Self-explanatory.

steps: Each job can have many of them.

actions/checkout@v2 - pull the repository code to the machine that was given to us for this run. We start with a clean state.

cancel-workflow-action - basically if we already running the same workflow from the same branch, we want to first cancel the old one, and only then start the new execution. We discard the result of the previous workflow.

We can actually pass values or variables as a parameter to the step with the keyword.

access_token: ${{ github.token }}

You see, github.token is actually a variable here. How do we know that it's available? - Documentation.

actions/cache@v2 - we want to cache SPM modules to not fetch them again and again.

Then, we select the Xcode version (in our case 13.0) that allows us to test the app with the desired iOS version (in our case 15.0). That's it. Now we can push and see how it works, but the most important part is missing - the unit tests.

You can use action’s matrix feature to run a job with multiple parameters. The workflow below will run two jobs: one with iOS version 15.2 and the second with version 15.0. As before, we also need to specify the appropriate Xcode version.

name: tests

on: [push]

jobs:
  run_tests:
    runs-on: macos-11
    strategy:
      matrix:
        include:
          - xcode: "13.2"
            ios: "15.2"
          - xcode: "13.1"
            ios: "15.0"
    name: test iOS (${{ matrix.ios }})
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1
    - name: Select Xcode
      run: sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode_$.app && /usr/bin/xcodebuild -version
    - name: Run unit tests
      run: xcodebuild test -scheme BudgetOnTheGo -project BudgetOnTheGo.xcodeproj -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 12,OS=$' | xcpretty && exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}        

Congrats! 🥳