Automated testing of iOS enterprise deployment

Question

I run the mobile development team at my company and we have an Enterprise app store to distribute the apps to our employees. The store is fed directly from our continuous build server (Jenkins on OS X).

Our biggest problem is that apps that compile and build properly on Jenkins often don't install on the device due to strange validation and license requirements that aren't imposed on dev devices.

Is there a way (preferably Jenkins integrated) to automate the testing of this deployment step ie push a built .ipa to a device and see if it installs correctly?

Answer 1

You can use Greg Hughes' transporter chief script to install your application from a shell, this script is using the same features as Itunes to install the ipa.

What errors do you get while installing? I've been running our ad hoc distribution site for alpha and dev builds towards our customers and developers, and it have worked pretty smoothly for the past 12-16 months.

As long as the app is built and signed successfully there haven't been problems with the distribution, although we've had some "false positive" builds where some part of the process borked the app, this have now been pretty much eliminated by monitoring the success of each step and proper clean up before next build.

Greg Hughes @ github