Is it possible to go from an .xcarchive bundle to an .app bundle without using the Xcode Organizer? I’d like to create an automated build and get the final .app file that I can distribute. Using xcodebuild with the archive target works great for getting the .xcarchive file, but not for the final app.
With the iOS SDK, there’s a PackageApplication tool you can use with xcrun, but this doesn’t appear to exist with the OS X SDK.
I’d also like to do this so I can hopefully get more diagnostics from the Distribution process, which is failing for me right now with the infamous 100021 OS error code.
Here is what I have discovered about this issue:
As previously suggested, the xcodebuild’s archive buildaction is good for getting the .xcarchive, but there does not appear to be an actual way to perform the validate or distribution commands from the command-line. I hope this eventually turns out to be false.
I was able to trick the validation tool by removing the embedded symbolic links in the embedded framework directories. This works, but after discussing with Apple support it turns out this is tricking the tool and not actually producing a valid result.
Apple support says they see this error code if one of the .plist files in an embedded framework is invalid. It turns out, in my example, I had 3 embedded frameworks and 1 of them had an empty .plist file, likely from me hand-building the project. After fixing that, the build would continue happily.