How to install Xcode via xcodes without authentication?

[tamuseanmiller]

So, this might be a stupid question but I tried building the xcode packer template and immediately failed with:

Error: Failed preparing provisioner-block "file" ""

  on templates/xcode.pkr.hcl line 127:
  (source code not available)

1 error(s) occurred:

* Bad source '/Users/<>/XcodesCache/Xcode_16.xip': stat
/Users/<>/XcodesCache/Xcode_16.xip: no such file or directory

I'm new to packer so not sure what the file provisioner is doing here. Is it trying to copy a cached version of an xcodes install from localhost? If so how does this work in the CI system since I don't see it being called locally (also not in the development documentation).

I also tried manually authenticating during the packer build step using the environment variables XCODES_USERNAME and XCODES_PASSWORD but there's a step after for multi-factor authentication which I can't turn off. Is there an extra step here I'm missing to install xcodes to a tart-packer image non-interactively?

[fkorotkov]

Authenticating with Developer Portal is a bit tricky especially if you have 2FA enabled. For that reasons, if you'll manually download Xcode to ~/XcodesCache/ folder on your host, then you'll be able to build the templates.

[tamuseanmiller]

Do you have some steps as to how you do this or automate it for a CI system? What is actually expected in that cache? Do you manually run xcodes with --directory to that folder or something on the host machine?

[fkorotkov]

For us, the process is a little manual. We use a dedicated host for building images (since nested virtualization is not supported for macOS) and we manually upload a *.xip for newly released Xcode. We generally use https://xcodereleases.com/ for monitoring for the new versions of Xcode.

[tamuseanmiller]

Thank you for your help! I'll give it a shot!