Continuous integration and delivery for iOS

Continuous integration, delivery and deployment practices help us continuously and automatically build, test and deploy iterative code changes. Using CI/CD can help developer teams to improve the quality of the code base, reduce the time and effort required to release new features, and make it easier for team members to collaborate on code. It can also help to improve the reliability and stability of deployments by automating the deployment process and providing early feedback on code changes.

In this article, we'll look at CI/CD concepts and how a CI/CD workflow can be realized when developing iOS applications.

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CI/CD concepts

Continuous integration (CI) is a practice in which developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, where they are automatically built and tested. This allows teams to detect and fix errors quickly and ensure that their code is always in a deployable state.

CI typically involves setting up an automated build and test pipeline that is triggered whenever a developer pushes a code change. This pipeline can include tasks such as compiling code, running static analysis tools and running tests. If any of these tasks fail, the pipeline can be configured to alert the team so that they can investigate and fix the issue.

Continuous delivery (CD) takes continuous integration a step further by also deploying the code changes to a staging or production environment.

CD can also refer to continuous deployment. The key difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is that continuous delivery allows for manual intervention and review before code is deployed to production, while continuous deployment automatically deploys all code changes to production as soon as they are ready.

Main components of a CI/CD workflow

The main components of a CI/CD workflow are:

• A central repository where the team's code is stored and managed. In most cases, it's the version control system Git, where each code change is committed and tracked.
• A build server that is responsible for building the code and running tests whenever a code change is pushed to the central repository.
• A deployment environment where the code will be deployed, such as a staging or production environment. This can be a local server, a cloud-based platform, or in case of iOS applications a third-party service like Testflight and App Store.
• A pipeline which is a set of automated steps that are executed when triggered by a code change. The pipeline can include tasks such as building the code, running tests and deploying the code.

CI/CD workflow for an iOS application

A CI/CD workflow for an iOS application might look something like this:

1. A developer creates a new Git branch, develops and tests a new feature, pushes it to a shared Git repository and creates a Merge Request.
2. The Merge Request triggers a CI/CD pipeline, which builds the code and runs unit and UI tests.
3. If the build and tests are successful, another developer reviews the code. Every pushed code change resulting from the review triggers the pipeline to again build and test the code.
4. When the Merge Request is accepted and merged, a pipeline can automatically deploy the code to a staging environment, where it can be tested further by QA team members or beta testers.

The pipeline can also be configured to perform other tasks, such as automatically releasing a new version of the app to the App Store or generating release notes.

Tools to realize CI/CD workflows

To realize CI/CD workflows, there are many tools available, for example Jenkins, CircleCI, TeamCity, Bamboo, GitLab CI, Travis CI, Codemagic and more.

These are just a few examples of CI/CD tools. There are many other tools available and the right choice depends on specific needs and requirements for a team.

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