SwiftGen

SwiftGen is a tool to automatically generate Swift code for resources of your projects (like images, localised strings, etc), to make them type-safe to use.

Installation Configuration File Choosing your template Additional documentation Then generate constants for: Assets Catalogs Colors Core Data Fonts Interface Builder files JSON and YAML files Plists Localizable strings

There are multiple benefits in using this:

• Avoid any risk of typo when using a String
• Free auto-completion
• Avoid the risk of using a non-existing asset name
• All this will be ensured by the compiler and thus avoid the risk of crashing at runtime.

Also, it’s fully customizable thanks to Stencil templates, so even if it comes with predefined templates, you can make your own to generate whatever code fits your needs and your guidelines!

Installation

There are multiple possibilities to install SwiftGen on your machine or in your project, depending on your preferences and needs:

"${PROJECT_DIR}/swiftgen/bin/swiftgen" …

if [[ -f "${PODS_ROOT}/SwiftGen/bin/swiftgen" ]]; then
  "${PODS_ROOT}/SwiftGen/bin/swiftgen" …
else
  echo "warning: SwiftGen is not installed. Run 'pod install --repo-update' to install it."
fi

$ brew update
$ brew install swiftgen

swiftgen … 

$ mint install SwiftGen/SwiftGen

brew install swiftgen --HEAD

# Install bundle if it isn't installed
gem install bundle
# Install the Ruby gems from Gemfile
bundle install

# Binary is installed in `./build/swiftgen/bin`, frameworks in `./build/swiftgen/lib` and templates in `./build/swiftgen/templates`
$ rake cli:install
# - OR -
# Binary will be installed in `~/swiftgen/bin`, frameworks in `~/swiftgen/fmk` and templates in `~/swiftgen/tpl`
$ rake cli:install[~/swiftgen/bin,~/swiftgen/fmk,~/swiftgen/tpl]

~/swiftgen/bin/swiftgen …

Known Installation Issues On macOS Before 10.14.4

Starting with SwiftGen 6.2.1, if you get an error similar to dyld: Symbol not found: _$s11SubSequenceSlTl when running SwiftGen, you’ll need to install the Swift 5 Runtime Support for Command Line Tools.

Alternatively, you can:

• Update to macOS 10.14.4 or later
• Install Xcode 10.2 or later at /Applications/Xcode.app
• Rebuild SwiftGen from source using Xcode 10.2 or later

Configuration File

❗️
If you’re migrating from older SwiftGen versions, don’t forget to read the Migration Guide.

SwiftGen is provided as a single command-line tool which uses a configuration file to define the various parsers to run (depending on the type of input files you need to parse) and their parameters.

To create a sample configuration file as a starting point to adapt to your needs, run swiftgen config init.

Each parser described in the configuration file (strings, fonts, ib, …) typically corresponds to a type of input resources to parse (strings files, IB files, Font files, JSON files, …), allowing you to generate constants for each types of those input files.

To use SwiftGen, simply create a swiftgen.yml YAML file (either manually or using swiftgen config init) then edit it to adapt to your project. The config file should list all the parsers to invoke, and for each parser, the list of inputs/outputs/templates/parameters to use for it.

For example:

strings:
  inputs: Resources/Base.lproj
  outputs:
    - templateName: structured-swift5
      output: Generated/Strings.swift
xcassets:
  inputs:
    - Resources/Images.xcassets
    - Resources/MoreImages.xcassets
    - Resources/Colors.xcassets
  outputs:
    - templateName: swift5
      output: Generated/Assets.swift

Then you just have to invoke swiftgen config run, or even just swiftgen for short, and it will execute what’s described in the configuration file.

The dedicated documentation explains the syntax and possibilities in details – like how to pass custom parameters to your templates, use swiftgen config lint to validate your config file, how to use alternate config files, and other tips.

There are also additional subcommands you can invoke from the command line to manage and configure SwiftGen:

• The swiftgen config subcommand to help you with the configuration file, especially swiftgen config init to create a starting point for your config and swiftgen config lint to validate that your Config file is valid and has no errors
• The swiftgen template subcommands to help you print, duplicate, find and manage templates bundled with SwiftGen

Lastly, you can use --help on swiftgen or one of its subcommand to see the detailed usage.

Choosing your template

SwiftGen is based on templates (it uses Stencil as its template engine). This means that you can choose the template that fits the Swift version you’re using — and also the one that best fits your preferences — to adapt the generated code to your own conventions and Swift version.

Bundled templates vs. Custom ones

SwiftGen comes bundled with some templates for each of the parsers (colors, coredata, fonts, ib, json, plist, strings, xcassets, yaml), which will fit most needs; simply use the templateName output option to specify the name of the template to use. But you can also create your own templates if the bundled ones don’t suit your coding conventions or needs: just store them anywhere (like in your project repository) and use the templatePath output option instead of templateName, to specify their path.

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You can use the swiftgen template list command to list all the available bundled templates for each parser, and use swiftgen template cat to show a template’s content and duplicate it to create your own variation.

For more information about how to create your own templates, see the dedicated documentation.

Templates bundled with SwiftGen:

As explained above, you can use swiftgen template list to list all templates bundled with SwiftGen. For most SwiftGen parsers, we provide, among others:

• A swift4 template, compatible with Swift 4
• A swift5 template, compatible with Swift 5
• Other variants, like flat-swift4/5 and structured-swift4/5 templates for Strings, etc.

You can find the documentation for each bundled template here in the repo, with documentation organized as one folder per SwiftGen parser, then one MarkDown file per template. You can also use swiftgen template doc to open that documentation page in your browser directly from your terminal.

Each MarkDown file documents the Swift Version it’s aimed for, the use case for that template (in which cases you might favor that template over others), the available parameters to customize it on invocation (using the params: key in your config file), and some code examples.

Don’t hesitate to make PRs to share your improvements suggestions on the bundled templates
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Additional documentation

Playground

The SwiftGen.playground available in this repository will allow you to play with the code that the tool typically generates, and see some examples of how you can take advantage of it.

This allows you to have a quick look at how typical code generated by SwiftGen looks like, and how you will then use the generated constants in your code.

Dedicated Documentation in Markdown

There is a lot of documentation in the form of Markdown files in this repository, and in the related StencilSwiftKit repository as well.

Be sure to check the “Documentation” folder of each repository.

Especially, in addition to the previously mentioned Migration Guide and Configuration File documentation, the Documentation/ folder in the SwiftGen repository also includes:

• A templates subdirectory that details the documentation for each of the templates bundled with SwiftGen (when to use each template, what the output will look like, and custom parameters to adjust them, …)
• A SwiftGenKit Contexts subdirectory that details the structure of the “Stencil Contexts”, i.e. the Dictionary/YAML representation resulting of parsing your input files. This documentation is useful for people wanting to write their own templates, so that they know the structure and various keys available when writing their template, to construct the wanted generated output accordingly.
• Various articles to provide best practices & tips on how to better take advantage of SwiftGen in your projects:
  • Integrate SwiftGen in your Xcode project — so it rebuilds the constants every time you build
  • Configure SwiftLint to help your developers use constants generated by SwiftGen
  • Create a custom template, and watch a folder to auto-regenerate an output every time you save the template you’re working on
  • …and more

Tutorials

You can also find other help & tutorial material on the internet, like this classroom about Code Generation I gave at FrenchKit in Sept’17 — and its wiki detailing a step-by-step tutorial about installing and using SwiftGen (and Sourcery too)

Available Parsers

Asset Catalog

xcassets:
  inputs: /dir/to/search/for/imageset/assets
  outputs:
    templateName: swift5
    output: Assets.swift

This will generate an enum Asset with one static let per asset (image set, color set, data set, …) in your assets catalog, so that you can use them as constants.

internal enum Asset {
  internal enum Files {
    internal static let data = DataAsset(value: "Data")
    internal static let readme = DataAsset(value: "README")
  }
  internal enum Food {
    internal enum Exotic {
      internal static let banana = ImageAsset(value: "Exotic/Banana")
      internal static let mango = ImageAsset(value: "Exotic/Mango")
    }
    internal static let `private` = ImageAsset(value: "private")
  }
  internal enum Styles {
    internal enum Vengo {
      internal static let primary = ColorAsset(value: "Vengo/Primary")
      internal static let tint = ColorAsset(value: "Vengo/Tint")
    }
  }
  internal enum Targets {
    internal static let bottles = ARResourceGroupAsset(name: "Bottles")
    internal static let paintings = ARResourceGroupAsset(name: "Paintings")
  }
}

Usage Example

// You can create new images by referring to the enum instance and calling `.image` on it:
let bananaImage = Asset.Exotic.banana.image
let privateImage = Asset.private.image

// You can create colors by referring to the enum instance and calling `.color` on it:
let primaryColor = Asset.Styles.Vengo.primary.color
let tintColor = Asset.Styles.Vengo.tint.color

// You can create data items by referring to the enum instance and calling `.data` on it:
let data = Asset.data.data
let readme = Asset.readme.data

// you can load an AR resource group's items using:
let bottles = Asset.Targets.bottles.referenceObjects
let paintings = Asset.Targets.paintings.referenceImages

Colors

❗️
We recommend to define your colors in your Assets Catalogs and use the xcassets parser (see above) to generate color constants, instead of using this colors parser described below.
The colors parser below is mainly useful if you support older versions of iOS where colors can’t be defined in Asset Catalogs, or if you want to use Android’s colors.xml files as input.

colors:
  inputs: /path/to/colors-file.txt
  outputs:
    templateName: swift5
    output: Colors.swift

This will generate a enum ColorName with one static let per color listed in the text file passed as argument.

The input file is expected to be either:

• a plain text file, with one line per color to register, each line being composed by the Name to give to the color, followed by “:”, followed by the Hex representation of the color (like rrggbb or rrggbbaa, optionally prefixed by # or 0x) or the name of another color in the file. Whitespaces are ignored.
• a JSON file, representing a dictionary of names -> values, each value being the hex representation of the color
• a XML file, expected to be the same format as the Android colors.xml files, containing tags <color name="AColorName">AColorHexRepresentation</color>
• a *.clr file used by Apple’s Color Palettes.

For example you can use this command to generate colors from one of your system color lists:

colors:
  inputs: ~/Library/Colors/MyColors.clr
  outputs:
    templateName: swift5
    output: Colors.swift

Generated code will look the same as if you’d use a text file.

Cyan-Color       : 0xff66ccff
ArticleTitle     : #33fe66
ArticleBody      : 339666
ArticleFootnote  : ff66ccff
Translucent      : ffffffcc

internal struct ColorName {
  internal let rgbaValue: UInt32
  internal var color: Color { return Color(named: self) }

  /// <span style="display:block;width:3em;height:2em;border:1px solid black;background:#339666"></span>
  /// Alpha: 100% <br/> (0x339666ff)
  internal static let articleBody = ColorName(rgbaValue: 0x339666ff)
  /// <span style="display:block;width:3em;height:2em;border:1px solid black;background:#ff66cc"></span>
  /// Alpha: 100% <br/> (0xff66ccff)
  internal static let articleFootnote = ColorName(rgbaValue: 0xff66ccff)

  ...
}