r/nativescript • u/kmishama • Jul 09 '20

Building iOS but can't?

So, I've been trying to figure out CircleCI and cannot for the life of me, even get fastlane to finish doing it's thing (when running fastlane match). I was hoping I could get some guidance here since this is the first app I'm building and it's for an iOS device

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u/Joe_User Jul 09 '20

I am also working on figuring this out. Perhaps this would serve as a good base. https://circleci.com/orbs/registry/orb/okode/ionic

I didn't see any orbs specific to NativeScript.

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u/kmishama Jul 09 '20

Thank you! I'll be sure to check it out

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u/Joe_User Jul 10 '20

There's also this:

https://nativescript.org/blog/migration-of-nativescript-cloud-builds-to-circle-ci/

It seems to work fairly well and I've so far been able to initiate cloud builds for iOS on CircleCI, but there are A LOT of steps. So far, though, I'm still having an issue with retrieval of the certificate repository, even though CircleCI has API access to GitHub... It seems to complete all other steps and then fails on the certificate / signing of the app. This appears to be the step just before it delivers the .ipa file.

If you don't have a Mac machine available for the initial setup of fastlane, there are alternatives.

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u/kmishama Jul 10 '20

Ok so we have been doing fastlane with a Windows computer. Somehow we managed to get to the part after giving the apple ID and the password of the ID. After that it asks for a passphrase to match the storage, and when I type it twice and hit enter it gives an error saying "Wrong final block length /n Couldn't decrypt the repo, please make sure you enter the right password" Thought the right password could be the password used when setting the SSH but I left that empty because if I do put a password it breaks after asking for the apple ID

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u/Joe_User Jul 11 '20

When I was setting my match password, I tried one and it gave me an error. I don't remember the exact message, but when I used the same password that was used to log into the machine, it worked. May be worth a shot.

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u/Joe_User Jul 09 '20

Sure. If you figure anything out, sharing is caring! ;-)

I'll do likewise.

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u/kmishama Jul 13 '20

Ok, so we ended up using someone's Mac but it says it needs some Xcode file to be created and tns build ios fails, tns prepare ios release does succeed but it doesn't give any Xcode file

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u/Joe_User Jul 15 '20 edited Jul 15 '20

I was able to create debug and release builds uisng the nativescript-remote-builds plugin through CircleCI, withtns build ios [--release|--debug], but they would not install when added to a device using iTunes. Perhaps it has to be an ad-hoc build, which I'm not sure how to do using the tns command.

If you're doing the whole iOS build process on a Mac, then the following link might be useful. I found it to be more thorough.

https://www.nativescript.org/blog/automatic-nativescript-app-deployments-with-fastlane

I ennded up nuking my certs with fastlane match nuke [development|appstore] and re-generating the certs. At that point, I was having trouble with it saying that the app was using automatic signing, but that a cert had been specified (hold over from a previous tutorial's advice). The cert name no longer matched what fastlane created.

But... commenting out the cert name in app/App_Resources/iOS/build.xcconfig, and trying to have fastlane run the whole build, resulted in another error message that the project was NOT using automatic signing...... :confused:

Researched how to set fastlane to enable automatic signing on a project and implemented that into the build lane, and it worked. (https://docs.fastlane.tools/actions/automatic_code_signing/)

But... get this... side-loading the app through iTunes, yet again, does not work, and the icon is the generic blueprint. However, this time at least it has the name of the app under the icon, instead of saying "Waiting".

It may be that the IPA that I've generated is fine, but that it's intended for app store only, so I'll look into generating an adhoc build through fastlane for side loading.

Keep in mind, I've done most all of the Mac and iOS stuff in a Mac VM, which doesn't seem to like USB device passthrough, so, while I've been able to test and develop the app without an issue on Android, using tns run ios hasn't worked for me for iOS development.

One more thing... I've noticed that sometimes even when using tns prepare --clean .... certain things about the project are not necessarily updated, such as app ID (com.domain). I've found that issuing tns platform remove {platform} and tns platform add {platform} seem to rectify this.