I am working on a Swift based XCode project that is synced with Git based master repository. One of my team member has added few files, to the master which I have pulled.
I find those files in my project directory, but not in my project. When I am manually trying to add these files to the project, in that case, I am getting Modify tag on my project, then I am unable to pull new changes from master.
This is very annoying. How do I take care of this.
Also, how do we make sure as a team that everyone of us is working separately on different module, and make surely everyone is able to commit/pull each other's changes.
The project folder with M tag is prohibiting us from doing so.
Edit 1
I have followed steps for this as well
git rm -r --cached ProjectName.xcodeproj
git commit -m "Removed file that shouldn't be tracked"
Even after doing this,
I had made changes in File1.swift, with my team member's changes in File2.swift
He had already committed it, I wanted to pull those changes, however due to changes in File1.swift I was unable to pull it.In order to make it work, I had to discard changes in File1.swift and then only I was able to pull those changes. If this is so, then it is defeating the purpose of using git
Xcode project files
The Xcode project file, or to be more precise, the pbxproj file inside the xcodeproj container keeps track of all files (among other things). Unlike Eclipse, Xcode does not monitor your source/project folder for changes thus does not update the list of files which can lead to inconsistencies after a merge.
Merge conflicts
If your team member adds or removes a file in his local copy of the repository and pushes his changes to the server, he basically overwrittes the pbxproj and therefore updates the list of files of the Xcode project. If you pull those changes there are two possible scenarios:
Git can merge the changes automatically which usually means it will keep your copy of the pbxproj file without the updated file references.
Git cannot merge the changes and therefore indicates a merge conflict that you need to resolve yourself. Depending on the differences and amount of changes these merge conflicts can be pretty annoying to resolve. Sometimes it might be easier to just delete your copy of the pbxproj file, use the one from the server and reapply your local changes, e.g., add file references.
In both cases you might need to compare your pbxproj file against the one from the server and merge things by hand. And yes, your project file will be marked with an M (for modified) which is perfectly fine. Just commit your changes and you are good to go again.
One more thing: Whenever you want to pull changes from the git server you can either stash your changes (git stash) or commit them.
Avoiding merge conflicts
In case you want to avoid merge conflicts in the future, I recommend having a look at the following tools.
Cocoapods
Cocoapods can be used to modularise your project into smaller pieces by creating private Pods. The benefit of this technique: You do not have to keep track of newly added or removed files. Just run pod update and you are up and running again. There are several blog posts that describe this technique in detail, e.g., here
phoenx
At my former company we had a pretty huge codebase and ran into some trouble when using Cocoapods. Therefore, we have developed our own meta-build system called phoenx. Phoenx can generate Xcode project and workspace setups of arbitrary complexity. It uses metadata files (something like Podfiles and Podspecs) to generate the projects etc. . Build settings will be stored in xcconfig files. At the moment it does not provide any setup tool so you have to invest a bit of time to write the xcconfig and metadata files by hand. We are working on a more convenient way to use it though. If you want to give it a try you can install it via sudo gem install phoenx. Documentation is available on GitHub.
Hope that helps!
Related
My project had several folders that accidentally got added to my GitHub repository. I could delete them (one file at a time) from the GitHub website but that is tedious for a large number of files. I tried using git on the command line but it was conflicting with the Xcode source control updates. I would just like to do it graphically in Xcode if possible.
The closest Xcode question that I could find was this one, but it was about removing source control altogether, which I don't want to do.
I struggled with this for quite some time but it turned out to be fairly easy. I am sharing my answer below.
As long as you have your project already connected to a remote GitHub repository, all you have to do is use Finder to delete the files or folders.
Then go to Source Control and choose Commit and after that Push.
This will delete the files from your GitHub repository without you having to use the command line.
I'm running into an issue where branch merging fails because Crashlytics binaries are changing. I added Crashlytics to the gitignore, but now the framework doesn't show up if I checkout branches anymore.
Is there a way to deal with the merge conflicts or a way to tell git to ignore changes to the file, but keep the file itself?
If you want the file in a fresh clone, or after cleaning a git repository it needs to be tracked by git.
Binary files are not pretty to merge. From you question it sounds like there isn't anything to merge, but the decision is just which file to keep.
One thing you could do is define custom automatic merge behavior for these binaries via .gitattributes and .git/config settings:
Add the following to your .gitattributes (or create a new file with that content in the root of your git repository)
path/to/file merge=nomerge
and place the following into a git configuration file (.git/config, or ~/.gitconfig)
[merge "nomerge"]
name = keep current version
driver = true
This instructs git just ignore the conflict and keep the file from the branch into which you are merging.
The driver = true specifies an external program to use for merging. In this case the program is true which should be available on any unix like system and does nothing successfully.
See the gitattributes manpage section on Defining a custom merge driver on ways to add real custom logic if you need something smarter.
On could do really complex things like always keeping the higher version of the file, if there is any version indicator in file for example.
You should git add the .gitattributes file to the repository. The actual merge driver definition can't be stored in a way that new clones get it automatically out ouf the box. So you need to add this manually into each clone or in the per user config on every computer where you need it.
We work with a git respository that has over 20,000 files.
My group maintains local versions of about 100 or so of configuration and source files from this repository. THe original acts as a sort of base that several groups modify and tweak to their own needs (some core things are not allowed to be changed, but front end and some custom DB stuff are different between groups)
So we want to update to the latest version generally, but not have the git update overwrite the files that we keep local modifications for.
The machines we use are windows based. Currently the repository gets cloned to a windows server that then gets checked out/cloned to the development machines (which are also windows). The developers make changes as necessary and recommit to our local repo. The local repo updates against the master daily. We never commit back to the master.
So we want all the files that haven't been changed by our group to update, but any that have been changed (ever) won't get updated.
Is there a way to allow this to happen automatically, so the windows server just automatically updates daily, ignoring those files we keep modifications for. And if we want to add a new file to this "don't update" list its just a right-click (or even a flat file list away). I looked at git-ignore but it seems to be for committing, not for updating.
Even better would be a way to automatically download the vanilla files but have them renamed automatically. For example settings.conf is a file we want to keep changes on generally, but if they modify the way entries in that file are handled or add extra options it would be nice it it downloaded it as settings.conf.vanilla or something so we just run a diff on .vanilla files against ours and see what we want to keep. Though this feature is not absolutely necessary and seems unlikely.
If this cannot be accomplished on a windows machine (the software for windows doesn't support such features), please list some Linux options as well if available. We do have an option to use a Linux server for hosting the local git repo if needed.
Thanks.
It sounds like you're working with a third party code base that's under active development and you have your own customisations which you need to apply.
I think the answer you're looking for is rebase. You shouldn't need to write any external logic to achieve this, except for a job which regularly pulls in the third party changes and rebases your modifications on top of them.
This should also be more correct than simply ignoring the files you've modified, as you won't then accidentally ignore changes that the third party has made to those files (you may sometimes get a conflict, which could be frustrating, but better than silently missing an important change).
Assuming that your local repo is indeed simply a fork, maintain your changes on your own branch, and every time you update the remote repository, simply rebase your local branch on top of those changes:
git pull origin master
git checkout custom_branch
git rebase master
Edit
After you've done this, you'll end up with all the changes you made on your custom_branch sitting on top of master. You can then continue to make your customisations on your own branch, and development of the third party code can continue independently.
The next time you want to pull in the extra changes, you'll repeat the process:
Make sure you're on the master branch before pulling in changes to the third party code:
git checkout master
Pull in the changes:
git pull origin master
Change to your customised branch:
git checkout custom_branch
Move your changes on top of the third party changes:
git rebase master
This will then put all your own changes on top of master again. master itself won't be changed.
Remember that the structure of your repo just comes from a whole set of "hashes" which form a tree. Your branches are just like "post it" notes which are attached to a particular hash, and can be moved to another hash as your branch grows.
The rebase is like chopping off a branch and re-attaching it somewhere else. In this case, you're saying something like "chop off our changes and re-attach them on top of the main trunk".
If you can install a visual tool like GitX, it will really help to see how the branch tags move around when you rebase. The command line is ideal for working with but I find something like GitX is invaluable for getting a handle on the structure of your repo.
I can create a repo and use GitHub / BitBucket fine for my own projects. I have had problems when collaborating with other developers or trying to fork a project on GitHub.
I am aware of other answers like Best practices for git repositories on open source projects but there are OSX / Xcode specific problems I want to know how to solve.
.DS_Store files can be a pain. You can use .gitignore to prevent, but what happens if they have already been included, or another developer adds them back in through a clumsy git command?
The .xcodeproj will have changes to the directory names and developer profiles for the other person. What's the best way to do merges or to avoid conflicts?
If I have forked or pulled from a github project, how can I clean up these issues and also minimise merge conflicts for the maintainer?
If people have an example .gitignore created for Xcode, or scripts they use to initialise their repos then that would be great!
Put .DS_Store in .gitignore. Then, if you haven't already, add .gitignore to the repo. (You should not ignore .gitignore.) Now all developers will ignore .DS_Store files. If any were added to the repo erroneously before you put .DS_Store in .gitignore, you can now remove them (in a commit) and they should stay out.
The xcodeproj is a directory. The only file in this directory that must be in the repository is the project.pbxproj file. I generally ignore all of the others by putting these lines in my .gitignore:
*.xcuserstate
project.xcworkspace/
xcuserdata/
You should avoid putting absolute paths in your build settings. Use relative paths.
Your Debug and Release builds should use iPhone Developer as the code signing identity, so that Xcode will automatically select the local developer's profile. When you want to create an IPA (for distribution), Xcode will offer to re-sign it with a different identity, at which point you can choose your distribution profile if you need to.
If you're trying to use a project from github that has made these mistakes, you can try to get the maintainer to fix them, or you can make sure you don't touch the .DS_Store files and the code signing identities in the same commits that you want to send upstream.
For the 2nd issue regarding the .xcodeproj and merge conflicts.
Using a .gitattributes file to specify that merge conflicts for all .pbxproj files should be handled using the merge=union strategy, which should mean that Git knows to merge in the changes from both sides of the conflict, taking the upstream changes first.
This article explains it in a bit more depth
I'll try one by one:
I. You need to use git filter-branch only if you need to remove the files from your history completely. If those files do not contain any credit card information, then i think the following should be enough:
git rm --cached .DS_Store
git commit -m "{Your message}"
then add this file to .gitignore and commit it.
This will commit the removal of the file from the repository but will keep the file in working directory. If you push it though and then somebody else will pull this commit, they might have their file removed, so you MUST communicate this.
By committing .gitignore you will prevent other developers from adding this file again.
If you're not a maintainer, then i don't think you should do anything, but address this issue to the maintainer.
II. I'm a strong believer that hidden files of any nature are most of the time not supposed to be put into the repository exactly for that reason. Therefore i think that you should do the same thing with .xcodeproj as with .DS_Store and put it into .gitignore and commit it. .gitignore is the exception for the rule above.
III. If those files are properly ignored , then there will be no issues in future with them. If they are already in the repo and somebody wants do such cleanup it should be done by maintainer and communicated inside the team.
Hope that helps!
git filter-branch might help you to remove unwanted files (.DS_Store files) from your repository -- see e.g. https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data
If a clumsy git commit has added files you should be able to replay the corrected changesets onto a clean repository.
You're right in the sense that if a .DS_Store is already added the .gitignore won't be of much help however I think this is still a good resource for you and others.
When I start a project, I normally look at this list to see if there is a good .gitignore already existing. More specifically for you, this one is the Objective-C .gitignore.
Hopefully those resources are of some use.
As a Mac user you should download a tool like SourceTree which supports Git Flow. Git Flow will help you establish some best practices around how your collaborators will commit code to the repo and at the very least make merge conflicts less frequent and more manageable. For a set of gitignore files for various project types you can go to GitHub and download one that is ready to go. For Xcode they have it listed as Objective-C.gitignore. That is a good starting place and it even covers Cocoapods. If you're using external libraries, your project should use CocoaPods so that you can isolate that code and keep it outside of your repo and avoid git submodules.
Now when you find a file has made it into your repo like .DS_Store just remove it, and move on. Make sure you add it to the .gitignore file that is checked into the project.
As for xcodeproj... there shouldn't be that much customization within the file that is user specific since the above mentioned gitignore filters that out. If a scheme is to be shared make sure you check shared under Manage Schemes and you will check in files in that subdirectory. You should be using automatic selection of certificates so the only real choice is Developer or Distribution. You should also take advantage of variables provided within Xcode that avoid hardcoding complete paths. When trying to think of an example Plists came to mind, in this case, you might have written /Users/me/MyProject/Resources/MyProject.plist, but instead should use $(SRCROOT)/resources/MyProject.plist.
I have been using XCode with subversion for some time now, no problem was caused when I was using it as a single developer (I was using 2 commands only, commit and add).
But now I have to share the code with another developer (who has never used any kind of version control) and integrating/merging the code has become a nightmare. No problem occur when we are integrating/merging .h/.m files but as soon as it comes to ".nib", "xcodeproj" and ".xcdatamodeld" files, we really don't know what to do.
Whenever we try to merge "xcodeproj", project was getting corrupt and merging ".xcdatamodeld" was kind of impossible for us.
So I was wondering if someone can share his/her experience on how to effectively use subversion/git/mercurial with XCode 4.0 in multiuser environment? or share a link, which can explain how to use subversion effectively in multiuser environment.
Thanks.
Are you doing this using Subversion? For 90% to 99% of the files in your repository, the standard Subversion workflow of checkout, edit, commit works well. However, for some types of files such as JPEGS and GIFS simply don't merge well. In this case, you'll have to do it the way we use to in the old SCCS and RCS days: Before you can edit and commit a file, you must lock it.
Locking a file prevents others from editing the same file and committing changes while you're doing your work on the file. It's crude, but it works. In Subversion, you can always lock any file you're editing, but if the file has the property svn:needs-lock on it, it will be checked out as read-only. You have to lock the file before editing it to make it writable, and you're not allowed to commit the file unless it is locked.
So, for those files, set the svn:needs-lock property on it.
You can automatically set this property on all newly added files (depending upon suffix) via setting the auto-properties in your Subversion client configuration.
And, if you really, really want to make sure that all .nibs and xcodeproj and all of the other flies of these types have svn:needs-lock set on them, you can use my pre-commit hook which will prevent these files from being committed unless this property is set.
There is no failsafe way to merge these kinds of files that I am aware of. So you will have to
try to ensure that only one person is changing these files at a time. That won't work always, so just log what you changed in the file with the commit message. Then if there is a conflict, you can manually resolve it by taking the version that changed more of the file and redo manually what the other person did.
That's normally not a big deal, like adding a new source file to an .xcodeproject, or changing the alignment of an element in a .nib. It's becoming a problem if your project is huge or your nib is containing the whole interface. For it to work well (which in practice it does), you need to split up your projects into sub-projects if they grow too huge.
I had the same problem with 2 other developers Xcode with git. Unfortunately, Xcode project files are an XML file, tracks file included in the project as well as setting. I'm not certain, but I think .nib files are also XML files as well. Someone can correct me on that.
Git did a great job at merging the Xcode project file, and never really had any problems with our *.nib files either. The only time we did have a problem is when we both added/removed files with the same names, or someone did a lot of heavy removing and adding of a lot of files.
The only way we solved this was to have each other push ann pull as soon as we added/removed files. So that way the person had the latest files, and didn't add them in their own repository then pull the latest commit which had the same file in it. Or they work adding changes to a file that was removed or renamed.
That is the best solution we found, as soon as we added or removed a file have everyone else in the team pull. Not a great solution btw. However, you should be committing often anyways.