When committing changes to GIT repo, i see constant updates coming from the xcuserstate files.
What are those?
xcuserstate files are generated from within Xcode and saved in your project bundle to remember your last opened file, the open state of any group folders, open tabs, and any other user setting your project might need to remember. For purposes of revision control, you should ignore them or leave them out if at all possible.
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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 inadvertantly did a very stupid thing last night. I have been working on an iPad project for a couple of months and (even more stupidly) do not have a backup. By right-clicking on the project in XCODE, I mistakenly clicked "Discard Changes"
(stupidity reigns again) I did not have any commits since the initial and when I did the Discard Changes, it seems that it went all the way back to the initial commit, which if I am looking at things correctly looks like each file is as it was the very first time it was saved.
My question is: Is there a way to recover my work? Is it in the .git directory? Is a copy stored elsewhere? or as a last resort, any chance to recover some of the source text with an un-delete utility?
Thanks,
Bob
For little clarification.. one can put back files from the trash as discard changes sends the file in the trash
Answer copied from How to undo xcode discard all changes if not committed
Quit Xcode.
Open the file you wish to bring back your lost changes to using TextEdit.
Go to File -> Revert To -> Browse All Versions...
Scroll through the available versions. Hopefully you will have many available to choose from.
Select a version and hit Restore.
Follow 1-5 for all necessary files.
Launch Xcode. You should now see the M next to these files in Project Navigator indicating they include uncommited changes (the changes you previously discarded).
Completely new files you may have created and were discarded can be found in the Trash.
Also a small piece of advice. If you are in need to discard changes, prefer using Source Control -> Discard Changes by right clicking on files in the Project Navigator, instead of Discard All Changes which might give you all kinds of trouble.
Have a nice day. :)
Well luck was on my side after all. As it turns out, when I did the Source Control > Discard Changes operation, it did not make any changes to the source code save in my project directory. I was able to start a new project and added the files back in. Once I did that I was able to compile and run my project in the simulator just as it was before the incident. I now have a backup as well as committed the changes in git.
You have a hope of fetching this code if you "pushed" & committed your prior-to-discarded changes into your local git repository. Or if you're using MacOS's included Time Machine or some other automated backup solution.
Aside from that, you might be hosed.
If you're on Lion or later, you may have Time Machine backups even if you don't have an external drive. As of Lion, Time Machine will take 'local snapshots' of files; this is how they support the "Versions" feature that lets you go back to previous versions of your files.
If you didn't have Time Machine turned on, though... you may be out of luck.
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.
I deleted default.png from my resources folder because I wanted a different image for the loading screen, but I just deleted the reference which was apparently a dumb thing to do. I dragged the new image into resources and tried to change the name to Default.png, but it won't let me, which I think is because the first Default.png is still in the repository somewhere. Anyway, how do I delete that image(and others with which I have probably done the same thing) from the repository when it is no longer visible in xcode?
What kind of repository is it? Subversion? Git?
The SCM integration in Xcode is great for checking out files and committing changes without having to leave the IDE, but it's hardly a full-blown GUI front end to either svn or git. It may be possible to fix your mistake by adding the file back to the project and then deleting it in Xcode in such a way that Xcode will remove it from the repository for you, but the simple solution is to just delete the file from the repository yourself by using the appropriate version control command. For example, if you're using Subversion you could:
svn remove default.png
to remove the file from your version of the repository. When you commit your changes, the file will be deleted in that version. (It'll still exist in previous versions -- that's the whole point of SCM, after all.)
After that, you can create the new file and add it to both the project and the repository in the usual way.
You need to manually go into your app's file structure and delete the image files themselves. Also, it is usually a good idea to "clean" the app whenever you remove files or references to files from an XCode project, since XCode can be a bit temperamental about removing files; the key combination for this is
Hope this fixes your problem.
Clean all targets should work (at least it worked for me). You can try the following:
a) delete the reference from "Copy Bundle resources" of your target
b) delete the app from Simulator/Device
c) clean all targets
Caleb is absolutely right. That fixed the problem here as well for the most files.
An easier way to get an overview of the accidentally un-deleted files, is creating a bookmark of the working copy with Versions (SVN Software - in case you use SVN). There you can detect the problematic files grafically and delete them. I always have to do this after restructuring the project folder.