Optimizing Xcode Build time when using Firebase library

Question

Since I'm building using FireStore and few other Firebase library, the build time has doubled down. I'm wondering if there is a way to avoid compiling it every time I clean & build my project.

Sandor

How do you manage the libraries? Adding frameworks (available) using Carthage can be an option to avoid building them each time, instead of CocoaPods. – Hump

@omerfarukozturk I though about that, but Carthage to much of a learning curve, I can’t impose that to the whole team – Sandor

@omerfarukozturk And yes im using cocoapods – Sandor

Answer 1

For anyone stumbling on this post, we finally found a way to optimize Firestore build time while still using cocoapods.

We are using THIS REPO

It's a precompiled Firestore iOS SDK xcframework files extracted from the Firebase iOS SDK repository release downloads, tagged by Firebase iOS SDK version and presented as a consumable podspec.

Why

Currently the Firestore iOS SDK depends on some 500k lines of mostly C++, which when compiling as part of your Xcode build takes a long time - even more so in CI environments.

Sandor

Why is this better than heyfranks answer? – Zoes

Because it didn't work for me, when other package have firebase dependencies as well... But you do you boo – Sandor

Answer 2

Don't clean & build, just build. ;)

Disclaimer: Before doing releases, a clean build is preferred, of course.

---

UPDATE with better answer: Use cocoapods-binary plugin.

https://guides.cocoapods.org/plugins/pre-compiling-dependencies.html

One solution for this is to not give Xcode the chance to re-compile code. CocoaPods Binary will pre-compile your Pods during pod install, and then add the binary assets (e.g. .framework files) into the generated Xcode projects instead of the source code.

Like this.

plugin 'cocoapods-binary'
use_frameworks!

target "MyApp" do
  pod "NeededPod", :binary => true
end

Plucky

Haven't though about that, you're a genius – Sandor

Haha, I really was trying to help. I was thinking, maybe you have this habit to always clean and build during development, which doesn't lead to much more compile time in a small project. @Sandor – Plucky

I'm getting this error: target has transitive dependencies that include statically linked binaries – Sandor

Seems like this cannot be used when I have many external pod using Firebase as well... – Sandor

where to put this code snippet? – Lithology

In your Podfile @Lithology – Plucky

Answer 3

Run this in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode IDEBuildOperationMaxNumberOfConcurrentCompileTasks `sysctl -n hw.ncpu`

It will parallelize the build. So if you have many cpu's it is much faster!

Tavis