Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode -->Lately, I’ve heard several Apple related podcasters talk about how bad Xcode is, and how Apple needs to make vibe-coding Mac and iOS apps better by making Xcode less inscrutable. They’re not wrong, but also I don’t understand why they’re even opening Xcode in the first place. With a little bit of pre-work, you can vibe code Mac and iOS apps to your heart’s content without looking at Xcode anymore.

And if you’re ever in doubt about how to make any of the following work, point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out. That’s literally its job, figuring out things you don’t want to have to.

TL;DR

Xcode.app must be installed, but it never has to be open. xcodebuild, notarytool, stapler, and devicectl all live inside Xcode and run fine from a shell.

A few one-time steps do need the GUI (or an interactive terminal): sign into your Apple ID, create a Developer ID certificate, store a notarization password. After that, builds and deploys are fully headless.

The Mac app ships via one script — scripts/release.sh — which you write once. It runs the whole chain: archive → Developer ID sign → notarize → staple → install to /Applications.

Signing is certificate-and-keychain based. The signing key lives in the login keychain; xcodebuild finds it automatically. No secrets in the repo.

The one-time setup is the only part with any friction, so let’s get it out of the way first.

Install Xcode

You do have to have Xcode installed, there’s no getting around that, because build depends on tools that live inside Xcode.app.

Once Xcode is installed, make sure it’s the selected command line toolchain, and not /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools. If the output of the check is /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer, you’re in good shape:

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❯ xcode-select -p

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

If it DOES return the path for the standalone CommandLineTools instead, point it to Xcode intead.

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sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

NOTE: The name “Command Line Tools” can be confusing.

This is because there’s a standalone Command Line Tools package, available with xcode-select --install, which is the /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools version. This contains clang and git, but not the iOS SDK, notarytool, devicectl, and other items needed for full app development.

The complete toolchain is inside Xcode.app, at /Applications/Xcode.app/Developer, and it has everything you need. If you have Xcode installed, you don’t need the standalone Command Line Tools.

Install XcodeGen

Xcode and its command line tools aren’t enough to generate and manage Xcode projects automatically. For that, you’re going to need XcodeGen. You can download it from Github or install it using homebrew:

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brew install xcodegen

Long story short, Xcode projects are actually folders that macOS makes appear as files, and they contain everything about your project needed to create and compile your app. Xcode constantly modifies the files and file references constantly, and it creates issues for git repositories.

Xcodegen creates a project.yml (YAML) file with all your project settings, and then on every build, it recreates the entire .xcodeproj folder using that project.yml file. Only the YAML file has to be committed to git, and the whole .xcodeproj can be ignored from git’s perspective.

Configure Xcode, Once

You do need to setup Xcode initially in order to never have to look at it again.

Xcode License and Additional Components

First, either accept its license and install its additional components, or do it through the command line:

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sudo xcodebuild -license accept

sudo xcodebuild -runFirstLaunch

Setup Your Apple Developer Account in Xcode

Next, open Xcode, click on Settings → Accounts and click on + to add your account.

NOTE: You have to have a paid Apple Developer account in order to distribute and notarize your apps.

And you will want them notarized in order to install them on you Mac and iOS devices and not have the OSes decided they’re malware and delete them.

Create a Developer ID Application Certificate

Once that’s done, create a Developer ID Application certificate (Settings → Accounts → your Apple ID → Manage Certificates… → + → Developer ID Application ), which creates a cert for signing the shipped .app bundle.

Please note that a Developer ID Application certificate and your Apple Development certificate are two separate things.

The Apple Development identity is for building and running on your own devices — pushing to your iPhone, local debugging. The Developer ID Application identity is for the notarized .app that survives Gatekeeper and runs on someone else’s Mac. The release script wants that second one.

Creating the certificate in Xcode installs both the certificate and its private key into your login keychain....