I’m pretty content with my current job and the work that I am doing. The only negative to this has been the business travel. While it can be nice (I can think of much worse things than a week or two in the bay area), it is physically and emotionally draining.

This is the second trip to the bay area for my current job. This trip was only one week instead of a two week trip. I like the one week trip, but everything seemed so hectic. I felt as though I didn’t have a moment to actually just rest. It also doesn’t help that I’m pretty restless when I’m away from Ashley and the puppies.

Your Code is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

• The server should run locally on my Mac Pro
• The server should be able to pull my projects down from a source code manager
• The server should be able to build iPhone applications and deliver .ipa files
• The server should be able to run tests in my iPhone projects
• The server should be able to give a report of the test results

The Solution

After a little bit of digging, I found the perfect solution for my server needs: Jenkins. Jenkins is an open source tool written in Java. There are numerous plugins available with a great community behind it. You can install everything yourself, but I stumbled across a great Mac application that will start and stop Jenkins for you: Jenkins App. With this tool I have Jenkins in my dock, which is very reassuring. It sort of gives a point of access to the scripts that trigger the starting and stopping of Jenkins, which I find to be very helpful.

After some more searching, I found a few articles to help me set up everything:

• Continuous Deployment of iOS Apps with Jenkins and TestFlight
• Continuous Integration for Xcode Projects

With these two tutorials, I was able to get 95% of the way there.

The Other 5%

There were a few things it didn’t cover though. I had recently upgraded my Xcode to version 4.3.2. I was replacing the previous version that I had installed (4.2 I believe). During that time, Apple changed how you installed Xcode. The changes made Xcode a standalone application from the Mac App Store. While good, I ran into a few issues. The first was that Xcode command line was running the previous version. To switch to the latest version, I had to fire up Terminal and run this command:

sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

Now when I tried to run my build plan in Jenkins, I failed with an error that I needed to accept the latest terms and conditions for Xcode. This one was a bit trickier, but I finally found the command to prompt me with Xcode’s terms and conditions:

sudo xcodebuild -license

After accepting this, my build plan ran very smooth and I am now up and running.

What You Should Take Away

This post isn’t a rewrite of the great instructions that I found elsewhere online, but rather an addition to cover the sticky spots that I ran into. I hope you find these tidbits helpful as I wanted to document them for anyone else who may run into them (as well as for myself).

About to board my return flight home to Nashville. I never wanted to live in Nashville when growing up, but now I hate leaving it.

Although I had a pretty good time out here, I did not get to do any programming outside of work. I don't want to write code all the time, but I was hoping to get some written.

See you soon Nashville.

In San Mateo for a week and a half visiting the AMA offices. I'm not a huge fan of getting here, but I find it pretty nice once I'm here. The weather is about 10 degrees Fahrenheit from being comfortable. It is definitely a little chilly here.

With us having a weekend here, it's given us some time to do some sight seeing. We went to the Ferry Farmer's Market, Pier 39 to see the sea lions, and then to the Golden Gate Bridge (which sadly isn't made out of gold). Today I plan on going to visit the TWiT Brick House. TWiT is a podcast hosted by Leo Laporte that I have enjoyed for many years and I cannot wait to visit a live show there. It's sort of a geek landmark. Then I will resume work during this next week except for a small excursion to Google's campus for lunch with a colleague.

Anyway, greetings from CA!

Merry Christmas from toddgrooms.com.