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environment Variables

Environment Variables

Setting environment variables on the project and reading from them via Xcode.

Setting variables

export TEST_RUNNER_QAENV=EnvironmentQA1

xcode build Env variables

Removing Environment variable

unset variablename

https://www.cloudbooklet.com/how-to-set-list-and-remove-environment-variables-in-linux/

Recent updates I believe from Xcode 12.5 gives an option for xcode-build-cli to be able to import the Environment variables of the host environment. Which leads to good opportunities towards getting xcode work in tandem with various CI/CD providers to have different SWITCH | A/B Behavior on dev environments locally or remote servers running the build commands.

You would need to either set the environment variable using 

export IS_CI_SERVER="false"

// Confirm your environment variable works
echo $IS_CI_SERVER

You could also define an .env file to source these kind of variables and your project or any kind of host runner needs to include this step as a script before executing the xcode-build

source .env

On iOS you can read the environment variable keys | values using this code snippet.

if let envV = ProcessInfo.processInfo.environment["IS_CI_SERVER"] {
    print("The environment variable \(envV)")                                                      
}

Issues

While importing the environment variables, sometimes your host terminal environment variables aren't being imported properly. But if you edit the main scheme of the app and append the Environment variables to that scheme it would be able to properly import that value.

But what if you want set it via CLI on your host and then xcode test or xcode-build-test CLI should appropriately get that file. You would have to specify the value as in Xcode Scheme GUI.

"IS_CI_SERVER" = ${IS_CI_SERVER}

https://medium.com/tauk-blog/passing-arguments-and-environment-variables-to-xctests-ebb60e55cece

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27500940/how-to-let-the-app-know-if-its-running-unit-tests-in-a-pure-swift-project

https://blog.kulman.sk/reading-environment-variables-from-unit-tests/