Archive for the ‘Playgrounds’ Category

Importing Web-based SwiftPM packages to your Xcode Playground

I’ve been kicking the wheels on Xcode 12 and its ability to use frameworks and packages with playgrounds. Up until now, I’ve only been able to import packages that are either downloaded or developed locally on my home system. However, a lot of the packages I want to work with are hosted from GitHub.

I decided to follow a hunch and see if I could import my dependency through a local Forwarding package and then use that code. Long story short: I could.

Here’s my playground, successfully running.

The RuntimeImplementation is declared in a GitHub-hosted package called Swift-General-Utility:

What I did to make this work was that I created what I called a Forwarding Utility, whose sole job is to create a shell package that depends on the remote package and forwards it to the playground. It looks like this. It is a single file called “Forwarding.swift” (no, the name is not at all magic.) in Sources/. I use @_exported to forward the import.

/*
 
 Use this to forward web-based dependencies to Swift Pkg
 
 */

@_exported import GeneralUtility

Its Package.swift installs the dependency:

    dependencies: [ .package(url: "https://github.com/erica/Swift-General-Utility", .exact("0.0.4")), ],
    targets: [
        .target(
            name: "ForwardingUtility",
            dependencies: [ .product(name: "GeneralUtility"), ],
            path: "Sources/"
        ),
    ],

And that’s pretty much all that there is to it, other than (as I mentioned in my other post about how to use SwiftPM packages in playground workspaces) that you may have to quit and re-open the first beta before you can import the forwarding.

Let me know anything that I messed up. But also let me know if this was helpful to you!

My xcopen adventures: playground workspaces

Now that Xcode 12 supports Swift Packages for playgrounds, I thought it was time to expand xcopen to build not only playgrounds but also allow you to embed them in workspaces.

xcopen in a nutshell

If you’re not familiar with xcopen (I’ve only mentioned it briefly on this website), it’s my answer to xed. It does what xed does more or less and adds more features that I use a lot.

I built xcopen to handle command-line activities that I regularly perform during development. If you run it without arguments, it looks for a workspace and then opens that. If no workspace is found, it looks for xcode projects and playgrounds. If you pass it file names and paths, it opens those instead.

OVERVIEW: 
xcopen ...        Open files in Xcode.
xcopen docs              Open .md and .txt files.
xcopen new               Create new files (if they don't exist), open in Xcode.
xcopen xc|ws|pg(w)       Open xcodeproj, workspace, or playground.
                           * Add ios|mac|tvos to create playground.
                           * Add w (pgw) to create playground in workspace.
xcopen pkg|xpkg          Open Package.swift in TextEdit or Xcode.

USAGE: xcopen [ ...] [--background] [--folder] [--open] [--no-open]

ARGUMENTS:
                   Files to open. If blank, opens xcworkspace or,if not
                          found, searches for xcodeproj. 

OPTIONS:
  -b, -g, --background    Open Xcode in the background 
  -f, -e, --folder        Enclose new items in folder 
  --open/--no-open        Open newly created playgrounds/workspaces (default:
                          true)
  -h, --help              Show help information.

Shortcuts let you gather up your docs (like README.md, CHANGELOG.md, and LICENSE.txt) and open them together for edits.

You control whether Xcode opens in the foreground or background, enabling you to keep working without Xcode taking up your immediate attention.

Recently, I added support for playground creation. Need a Mac playground? xcopen pg mac. It emulates Finder naming  so there won’t be naming conflicts. Instead, it builds macOS, macOS 2, macOS 3, etc as your root playground names. Based on feedback from my Twitterati pals (waves hi!), I added a flag that lets you group them together in a subfolder if you don’t want multiple playgrounds cluttering your working directory.

Adding Workspaces

Today, I decided to start working with Swift packages, so I added workspace creation:

xcopen pgw mac --folder

Using pgw builds both a playground and an associated workspace. Adding --folder embeds them both into a new folder. Otherwise they are created in the working directory.

Using Swift Package Support

Add any folder containing a Swift Package to your workspace:

  • Files > Add files to workspace name (may be greyed out); or
  • Project navigator contextual pop-up > Add files to workspace name; or
  • Or just drag the folder above your playground entry in the Project navigator to ensure you’re not adding it directly to your playground.

If your package has dependencies, they’re listed in the Project navigator.

Next, try importing the new package. If it doesn’t autocomplete, quit and restart Xcode and re-open your workspace. For some reason, in this early beta it doesn’t seem to get picked up immediately.

Then test out the functionality you’ve imported. In the following example, I’m using a custom exponentiation operator:

Wrap up

I’m using xcopen a lot these days, tooling it to make my workday easier. If you find a feature you think I should include please open an issue at github. And if you like the utility, do let me know. Thanks!

The easiest way to install xcopen is via mint, which you can install with brew. Once you have mint, all you have to say is mint install erica/xcopen.