Building Swift/Xcode Apps

Xcode projects fail in ways a package-manager-driven language never does: the build graph lives in a hand-edited project.pbxproj, CI can't sign, and the IDE lints against a module graph it doesn't actually have. The traps below each come from a build that was green locally and broken in CI (or vice versa). The rule throughout: trust xcodebuild, not the IDE, not swift build, not a green make test that runs nothing.

CI can't sign — build unsigned

CI runners don't have the developer team's provisioning profiles, so a normal build dies with "requires a provisioning profile". The half-fix everyone tries first — ad-hoc signing — does not work when the app declares entitlements (CloudKit, App Groups, Keychain sharing): the profile-bound entitlement check still fires.