KIN

Kin is a minimalistic tool to check whether your project.pbxproj file is correct.

What does it do?

Have you ever found yourself undoing a merge due to a broken Xcode build? Then Kin is your tool. It will parse your project configuration file and detect errors.

How does it work?

Kin is just a syntax checker built with ANTLR 4 with a very thin layer to be usable from command line. On the fly syntax checking integration for text editors and IDEs is a work in progress (see the "Text editor/IDE integration" section below).

Usage

Install Kin with your favorite python package manager. If you don't have one you can use pipx.

Using pipx

pipx install kin

Using easy_install

easy_install kin

Using Homebrew

brew install kin

Once installed, use Kin from your Xcode project directory. Kin will automatically detect where your project configuration is located and check whether it is correct.

$> kin
CORRECT

If there is an error in your configuration file, Kin will return the offending line and a short description of the problem found.

$> kin
ERROR: line 400:3 mismatched input ')' expecting 'inputPaths'

Optionally, you can provide the location of your project.pbxproj to Kin:

$> kin myProject/myProject.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
CORRECT

Text editor/IDE integration

The following text editor and IDE integration packages are available:

Emacs

• flycheck-pbxproj

Do you want to contribute?

Feel free to add any useful feature to Kin, we will be glad to improve it with your help.

Kin uses ANTLR to build a parser for pbxproj files. ANLTR can be installed with the following command:

brew install antlr

There is a Makefile that defines commands to work with Kin locally.

• make compile - Compiles the grammar into an ANTLR parser. Run it every time you make changes to the PBXProj.g4 file.
• make install - Installs a symlink of kin in your machine so that you can run it your local build.
• make test - Runs all tests.
• make test_last - It builds and installs kin and then runs it against the latest modified test file. This is usually your go-to command while working on kin.

Only the PBXProj.g4 file needs to be committed, GitHub Actions will produce the compiled grammar files.

License

Copyright 2023 Serchinastico

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.