Chapter 5
Building Projects

You’ve set up your project, created storyboards, and written the code… so the next step is obviously to build and run. Thing is, a lot of developers focus on the “and run” part of that, and remain blissfully unaware of the “build” part. And for sure, it’s liberating to go straight from your UI and code directly to how it works on the Simulator or a device. But the reason you can do that is that Xcode makes good default decisions about how to build your code.

Thing is, you may eventually have needs that take you beyond the defaults. Sometimes it’s necessary to take the build process into your own hands. And to do that, you have to understand how the build system works, and what’s even being built in the first place. That’s what this chapter is all about.