Kin is a minimalistic tool to check whether your project.pbxproj file is correct.

Have you ever found yourself undoing a merge due to a broken Xcode build? Then Kin is your tool. It will parse your project configuration file and detect errors.

Kin is just a syntax checker built with ANTLR 4 with a very thin layer to be usable from command line. On the fly syntax checking integration for text editors and IDEs is a work in progress (see the "Text editor/IDE integration" section below).

Install Kin with your favorite python package manager. If you don't have one you can use pipx.

Using pipx

pipx install kin

Using easy_install

easy_install kin

Using Homebrew

brew install kin

Once installed, use Kin from your Xcode project directory. Kin will automatically detect where your project configuration is located and check whether it is correct.

$> kin
CORRECT

If there is an error in your configuration file, Kin will return the offending line and a short description of the problem found.

$> kin
ERROR: line 400:3 mismatched input ')' expecting 'inputPaths'

Optionally, you can provide the location of your project.pbxproj to Kin:

$> kin myProject/myProject.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
CORRECT

The following text editor and IDE integration packages are available:

Emacs

• flycheck-pbxproj

Feel free to add any useful feature to Kin, we will be glad to improve it with your help.

If you modify the grammar file (PBXProj.g4), make sure you compile it using ANTLR. ANLTR can be installed with the following command:

brew install antlr

After changes have been made to the PBXProj.g4 file it can be compiled with:

cd kin/grammar
antlr PBXProj.g4 -Dlanguage=Python3

kin can optionally be symlinked by running this command in the root of the project:

pip install -e .

Only the PBXProj.g4 file needs to be committed, GitHub Actions will produce the compiled grammar files.

To run tests, first install the current version of kin by running pip install .. Then you can execute ./tests/tester.py to run all the scenarios we created.

Copyright 2023 Serchinastico

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.