XCode not showing files pulled from Source Control

Question

I am working on a Swift based XCode project that is synced with Git based master repository. One of my team member has added few files, to the master which I have pulled.

I find those files in my project directory, but not in my project. When I am manually trying to add these files to the project, in that case, I am getting Modify tag on my project, then I am unable to pull new changes from master.

This is very annoying. How do I take care of this.

Also, how do we make sure as a team that everyone of us is working separately on different module, and make surely everyone is able to commit/pull each other's changes.

The project folder with M tag is prohibiting us from doing so.

Edit 1

I have followed steps for this as well

git rm -r --cached ProjectName.xcodeproj

git commit -m "Removed file that shouldn't be tracked"

Even after doing this,

I had made changes in File1.swift, with my team member's changes in File2.swift

He had already committed it, I wanted to pull those changes, however due to changes in File1.swift I was unable to pull it.In order to make it work, I had to discard changes in File1.swift and then only I was able to pull those changes. If this is so, then it is defeating the purpose of using git

Answer 1

Xcode project files

The Xcode project file, or to be more precise, the pbxproj file inside the xcodeproj container keeps track of all files (among other things). Unlike Eclipse, Xcode does not monitor your source/project folder for changes thus does not update the list of files which can lead to inconsistencies after a merge.

Merge conflicts

If your team member adds or removes a file in his local copy of the repository and pushes his changes to the server, he basically overwrittes the pbxproj and therefore updates the list of files of the Xcode project. If you pull those changes there are two possible scenarios:

1. Git can merge the changes automatically which usually means it will keep your copy of the pbxproj file without the updated file references.

2. Git cannot merge the changes and therefore indicates a merge conflict that you need to resolve yourself. Depending on the differences and amount of changes these merge conflicts can be pretty annoying to resolve. Sometimes it might be easier to just delete your copy of the pbxproj file, use the one from the server and reapply your local changes, e.g., add file references.

In both cases you might need to compare your pbxproj file against the one from the server and merge things by hand. And yes, your project file will be marked with an M (for modified) which is perfectly fine. Just commit your changes and you are good to go again.

One more thing: Whenever you want to pull changes from the git server you can either stash your changes (git stash) or commit them.

Avoiding merge conflicts

In case you want to avoid merge conflicts in the future, I recommend having a look at the following tools.

Cocoapods

Cocoapods can be used to modularise your project into smaller pieces by creating private Pods. The benefit of this technique: You do not have to keep track of newly added or removed files. Just run pod update and you are up and running again. There are several blog posts that describe this technique in detail, e.g., here

phoenx

At my former company we had a pretty huge codebase and ran into some trouble when using Cocoapods. Therefore, we have developed our own meta-build system called phoenx. Phoenx can generate Xcode project and workspace setups of arbitrary complexity. It uses metadata files (something like Podfiles and Podspecs) to generate the projects etc. . Build settings will be stored in xcconfig files. At the moment it does not provide any setup tool so you have to invest a bit of time to write the xcconfig and metadata files by hand. We are working on a more convenient way to use it though. If you want to give it a try you can install it via sudo gem install phoenx. Documentation is available on GitHub.

Hope that helps!