Debugging iPhone App from Command Line

Question

I can do it from XCode, but I want to be able to launch an iPhone App (on the device) from the command line. Is it possible?

Why? Because I want to capture some of the output for semi-automated testing. I'm guessing I need to use a debug build for NSLog output, but I'd also be interested to know about other methods for getting NSLog / stdio data back to the host Mac.

Answer 1

There is a project on github called titanium_mobile (part of Titanium Developer).

I use a utility from that project called iphonesim. It launches an iPhone app from the command line (though I am not sure how, I think there is a way to do that with SpringBoard.app). If you take a step up one level in the Titanium Mobile code and look at builder.py you can see how they launch an app in the simulator and capture the output.

Answer 2

Ultimately I solved my specific need a different way. I needed to get data from the iPhone's accelerometers into a prototype app in Adobe AIR(Flash).

I used this app on the iPhone which drops UDP packets with X,Y,Z forces in them. http://code.google.com/p/accelerometer-simulator/wiki/Home

Found that from this blog post which might be of interest to people trying to do other similar things. http://ifiddling.blogspot.com/2009/01/dummy2.html

I used a Python script to present a server to Flash, grab UDP accelerometer packets, munge them into AMF and send them to Flash. Flash uses a socket to connect to this server and receive the accelerometer data.

A few parts, but it works nicely.

Answer 3

You can do this on the device if it is jailbroken. You can put a debug build and symbols on your device and run gdb on it. It is totally unsupported but I hear it works. Not sure if there is a good tutorial. Google?

Answer 4

One method would be to use the AsyncSocket class, and pass whatever data you want to log from the iPhone to a basic host app on the Mac, which NSLogs whatever it receives. If you follow the EchoServer application, you should be able to integrate it in just a few minutes