Is iOS developer productivity suffering in your organization? Let’s take a scenario of a company with more than one iOS developer working on different iOS projects. In such a setting developers tend to have issues running builds on CI, only to have it pass in their local environment. These types of failures during integrated build and test significantly impact developer productivity. When you dig into these issues, it’s very often because of incorrect global dependency linking, different library versions, incorrect or missing environment variables, or simply that their system is not set up with consistency.
While in theory, it’s possible to sanitize and standardize a developer’s machine, in practice, it’s almost impossible. Developers will always download new libraries and update versions of other tools to accelerate development, sometimes creating conflict with your build tools. Similarly, when iOS developers pull the latest source for development and build it on their systems, they face local build and test failures due to incompatibilities in the configuration of their dev environment. This problem is even bigger when iOS developers are simultaneously working on multiple projects.
Anka Run technology is built to address this issue. It brings the container-based development workflow to the iOS and macOS development world. Until now, it was not possible to package an iOS development environment in a container-like entity and distribute it to your team. Anka Run enables you to do this.
There are two modules in Anka Run. Anka Run for macOS and Anka Registry. Anka Run for macOS is a very lightweight engine with a footprint of 15MB, to create and run macOS VMs. Anka Registry is a repository where these iOS or macOS dev environment VMs are managed and can be pulled to each developer machine, creating a consistent developer experience everyone can use.
First, Anka Run is deployed on all iOS developer machines, and Anka Registry is set up in a docker container. After initial installation is complete, devOps engineers and/or developers can create fully self-contained iOS development environments with all dependencies in an “Anka VM”. This Anka VM is then versioned and pushed to Anka registry.
Next, developers continue to work in their native Xcode IDE or another environment. They pull the respective Anka VM corresponding to multiple projects and configurations on their machine and use them to execute local build and unit tests. With the ‘anka run’ command developers work from their local command line interface to execute builds and tests inside the Anka VMs.
The end result is that iOS developers are always building and testing against a common set of dependencies and linkages, without the need to set these on their machines. Simply put, Anka enables an agile and developer-centric approach.
Watch this video to see all Anka Run components in action.
Developing iOS applications in consistent local environments
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