A command-line guide for building and testing iOS and macOS apps with Apple's Xcode tools. It covers discovering projects and schemes, managing simulators, compiling apps, running tests, and collecting screenshots or logs.

Use it to list schemes, inspect build settings, find or boot simulators, build for a simulator, run tests, install apps, automate simulator actions, and capture logs.

It gives coding agents a consistent way to work with Apple projects directly from the terminal. This avoids depending on a separate automation service for common build and simulator tasks.

xcode-build — Skill by pzep1

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/pzep1/xcode-build-skill/xcode-build

Any agent

npx skills add pzep1/xcode-build-skill --skill xcode-build

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pzep1/xcode-build-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,621 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00068	$0.01621
Opus 5	$0.00034	$0.00811
Sonnet 5	$0.00014	$0.00324
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00162

Measured 2d ago against content hash 46508df05d49, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

xcode-build scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/xcode-build/SKILL.md · 229 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 229 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Xcode Build Direct

Build and manage iOS/macOS projects using native Xcode CLI tools instead of MCP servers.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

Building iOS or macOS apps with Xcode
Running apps in iOS simulators
Managing simulator instances (boot, shutdown, list)
Taking screenshots of simulators
Capturing app logs
Running tests (unit or UI)
Automating UI interactions (tap, type, swipe)

Preference: Always use direct CLI commands (xcodebuild, xcrun simctl) instead of XcodeBuildMCP tools.

Quick Start

1. Discover Project Structure

# List schemes in a workspace
xcodebuild -workspace /path/to/App.xcworkspace -list

# List schemes in a project
xcodebuild -project /path/to/App.xcodeproj -list

# Show build settings
xcodebuild -workspace /path/to/App.xcworkspace -scheme AppScheme -showBuildSettings

2. Find Available Simulators

# List all simulators
xcrun simctl list devices

# List as JSON (better for parsing)
xcrun simctl list devices --json

# List only available simulators
xcrun simctl list devices available

3. Build for Simulator

# Get simulator UUID first
UDID=$(xcrun simctl list devices --json | jq -r '.devices | .[].[] | select(.name=="iPhone 16 Pro") | .udid' | head -1)

# Build
xcodebuild \
  -workspace /path/to/App.xcworkspace \
  -scheme AppScheme \
  -destination "platform=iOS Simulator,id=$UDID" \
  -configuration Debug \
  -derivedDataPath /tmp/build \
  build

4. Install and Launch

# Find the built .app
APP_PATH=$(find /tmp/build -name "*.app" -type d | head -1)

# Install on simulator
xcrun simctl install $UDID "$APP_PATH"

# Launch app
xcrun simctl launch $UDID com.your.bundleid

5. Take Screenshot

xcrun simctl io $UDID screenshot /tmp/screenshot.png

Detailed References

For comprehensive command documentation, see:

CLI_REFERENCE.md - Full xcodebuild and xcrun simctl command reference
XCUITEST_GUIDE.md - UI automation via XCUITest (tap, type, gestures, element queries)

Read the full file on GitHub · 229 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2d ago First seen · 229 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 46508df05d49

Subscribe to this mod's changes

xcode-build is a skill published in the GitHub repository pzep1/xcode-build-skill (137 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,621 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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xcode-build