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iOS Development Environment

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Kyle Hickinson edited this page Jan 30, 2024 · 9 revisions

Prerequisites

  1. First follow the macOS Development Environment prerequisites.

  2. If you haven't already cloned brave-core, please follow the instructions in brave-browser's README to do so. Note: After cloning and running init you may need to have depot_tools in your PATH (e.g. $ export PATH="$PATH:/path/to/src/brave/vendor/depot_tools")

  3. Run src/brave/ios/brave-ios/scripts/bootstrap.sh at least once prior to your first build. This will ensure Xcode can load Package.swift correctly on first build.

  4. Optional: If you have installed node/npm via nvm, please ensure you have a symlink to the required version of npm found in the macOS Development Environment doc above in the standard /usr/local/bin directory (e.g. $ sudo ln -s $(which node) /usr/local/bin/ and $ sudo ln -s $(which npm) /usr/local/bin/. This is due to Xcode's build system not having insight into shell's PATH.

Note:

The iOS build used to be found in a separate brave-ios repo. This is now not the case, and you will find the same code in src/brave/ios/brave-ios. Only Swift code that is built with Xcode should be added to this folder. All other code should use GN and exist in the appropriate folders outside of brave-ios.

Building

Xcode will handle building brave-core for you based on the scheme and target you have picked. This means that if you build Debug to the iOS simulator, it will automatically build a Debug simulator build based on your host machines architecture (arm/intel). Note that this does mean that switching to a device build may incur a large build time if you haven't done so prior.

Note: Xcode builds brave-core using a scheme pre-action, which unfortunately does not show any progress indicator when you start the build aside from showing the "Stop" button. You can monitor progress from the build log until the pre-action completes.

Alternatively, if you'd like you can still build brave-core yourself using the standard npm run build commands and Xcode will use the output.

Building without brave-core

If you are doing frontend only work or are making frequent small incremental fixes in the Xcode project only it may be annoying eating the cost of building core each time even when there are no changes. You can avoid this by:

  1. Ensuring you have already built the Xcode project at least once since last pulling master and running sync using the standard Debug/Release scheme. This will make sure BraveCore xcframeworks are prepared already and ready to use.
  2. Creating a duplicate Debug scheme that does not have a pre-action. (Expand "Build" in the scheme, select "Pre-Action", then tap the trash button on the run script phase).

You can then use this scheme locally as you need, but keep in mind to use the Debug build often to keep everything in sync.

Debugging

Breakpoints should work like normal across both brave-core and brave-ios codebases as long as you ran the initial bootstrap script in the prerequisites list which will create an LLDBInit file to fix debug source mapping.

Build Acceleration

Internal developers can find more information on remote build execution here

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