How to setup GitHub Actions to bump the Xcode version

iOS Apr 7, 2023

I know what you think: "Updating the version is just one click away. Does it worth it? " It depends.

In our case, we have 6 targets (3 for production and 3 for staging), so what that means is that we have to go through all of the 6 targets and update them each time. And guess what, most of the time we forget about it and then we rush to create a PR to bump the version.

We also noticed that we don't have a procedure in place on when to update the version and that's when the GitHub Actions come into play.

So we came up with this process:

1) A release branch is created from master

2) We create a branch called bump/vX.X.X and our GA will:

Checkout the project
Update the Xcode version (using agvtool) to match the X.X.X on the branch
Commit the changes
Create a PR to master with the updated version

To achieve this process we came up with the following GA:

name: Bump Marketing Version and Open Pull Request
on:
  create:
    branches:
      - 'bump/v*.*.*'
jobs:
  bump-version-and-open-pr:
    runs-on: macos-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set new marketing version
        run: |
          VERSION=${GITHUB_REF#refs/heads/bump/v}
          echo New version will be $VERSION
          if [ -z "$VERSION" ]
          then
            echo "Error: No version number found in branch name."
            exit 1
          fi
          agvtool new-marketing-version $VERSION

      - name: Commit and push changes
        run: |
          git config user.email "[email protected]"
          git config user.name "Github Actions"
          git commit -am "Bump marketing version"
          git push origin HEAD
      - name: Open pull request
        uses: peter-evans/[email protected]
        with:
          commit-message: "Bump marketing version"
          branch: "${{ github.ref }}"
          title: "Version bump"
          body: "Version bump"
          base: "master"

If you are familiar with GA then you will find this .yml easy to understand (otherwise, I would advise you to get familiar with the basic concepts and then revisit this post). Just place the file under /.github/workflows and it's ready to run.

I hope you find this post useful! Happy coding!