How to add APP target back in to project?

macOS
1

A long time ago I removed the “APP” target from my iPlug2 projects. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time and thought I would never need a standalone build.

But now I do.

How do I add the APP target back in so I can generate a standalone app? It was simple to add it back in Visual Studio - but I don’t see how it’s done in Xcode.

I could start with one of the iPlug2 examples (iPlugEffect, etc.) but I spent a lot of time setting up compiler settings, code signing, etc. for all of my plugin builds and I would like use the same settings for the APP if possible. In other words, I would like to add the APP target to an existing project without having to start from scratch if that’s possible.

2

The easiest way, if your project was originally duplicated from one of the examples is to reduplicate an example and copy in the important source code files and resources. If you’ve made substantial changes to the xcode project or added many other files this could be tedious. If you’re very careful about it and make sure you keep a backup and track everything in git anyway In case something goes wrong, this can work well

1 Like
3

Thank you, Oli, but I was afraid you’d say that! It was so easy to do this in MSVS just by adding the app-vcxproj to the project explorer targets but I guess there is no way to do that in XCode.

It must have been a lot of work to set up the iPlug targets for Mac. Will try to clone something from iPlugEffect - or at least see how you did it.

Thank you.

4

I wanted to try adding an APP target to my existing “app-less” project - so I added an “APP” target using the XCode “add target” function. I named the target following iPlugEffect as an example. I went through all the build settings and set them all to be the same as iPlugEffect APP target (except the name). Along the way I found it very odd and confusing that even though I originally cloned my “app-less” project from iPlugEffect some of the build setting categories were different - or didn’t exist at all - or were in the Build Settings “Custom” section in one project but the “Basic” section in the other. Why? What controls this?

Anyhow, the APP compiles with no errors but does not run with an error saying the APP file is, “damaged or incomplete”. So the build settings are not the same somewhere.

I hoped to gain a better understanding of XCode - and may keep trying - but will likely have to go back to iPlugEffect and clone from that project as you suggested.