Can Alcatraz be used to add build rules?

Question

I'd like to create an Alcatraz plugin that adds a new project Build Rule to Xcode. Currently our tutorial requires that the developer manually add the rule, pasting in a script. None of the current plugins appear to add build rules -- is it possible?

Answer 1

It's probably possible because when writing a Xcode plugin you basically gain access to all Xcode's private classes & methods + the current Xcode state in memory. So yes, with a good amount of reverse engineering it should be doable.

Now I doubt this is a very good idea as such a plugin would act at the IDE level and not a project level, so you'd have to ask the user to select a project before adding the build rule.

From my point of view, building a plugin for this is way overkill, and a tutorial is good enough (you're interacting with developers after all, they probably know how to click a few buttons), and if you really want to take your users by the hand I'd recommend using a script (bash, python, ruby, etc.).

Crashlytics and Cocoapods both require to add a build step to the developer's project, and they both seems to do pretty well with instructions / a script.