Kivy for iOS
============
This toolchain is designed to compile the necessary libraries for iOS to run
your application and manage the creation of the Xcode project.
Currently, we do not provide any binary distributions of this toolchain, but we
aim to. Until then, you do need to compile it at least once before creating
your Xcode project.
The toolchain supports:
- iPhone Simulator (x86 and x86_64)
- iPhone / iOS (armv7 and arm64)
These recipes are not ported to the new toolchain yet:
- lxml
Requirements
------------
Currently, the toolchain requires a few tools for compilation. You will need:
#. Xcode 6 or above, with an iOS SDK and command line tools installed::
xcode-select --install
#. Using brew, you can install the following dependencies::
brew install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config
brew link libtool
#. Install Cython (0.23)::
# pip method if available (sudo might be needed.)
pip install cython==0.23
Using the toolchain
-------------------
Any Python extensions or C/C++ library must be compiled: you need to have what
we call a `recipe` to compile it. For example, Python, libffi, SDL2, SDL_image,
freetype... all the dependencies, compilation and packaging instructions are
contained in a `recipe`.
You can list the available recipes and their versions with::
$ ./toolchain.py recipes
freetype 2.5.5
hostpython 2.7.1
ios master
kivy ios-poly-arch
libffi 3.2.1
openssl 1.0.2e
pyobjus master
python 2.7.1
sdl2 iOS-improvements
sdl2_image 2.0.0
sdl2_mixer 2.0.0
sdl2_ttf 2.0.12
Then, start the compilation with::
$ ./toolchain.py build kivy
You can build recipes at the same time by adding them as parameters::
$ ./toolchain.py build openssl kivy
Recipe builds can be removed via the clean command e.g.::
$ ./toolchain.py clean openssl
The Kivy recipe depends on several others, like the sdl* and python recipes.
These may in turn depend on others e.g. sdl2_ttf depends on freetype, etc.
You can think of it as follows: the kivy recipe will compile everything
necessary for a minimal working version of Kivy.
Don't grab a coffee, just do diner. Compiling all the libraries for the first
time, 4x over (remember, 4 archs, 2 per platforms), will take time. (TODO:
provide a way to not compile for the simulator.).
For a complete list of available commands, type::
$ ./toolchain.py
Create the Xcode project
------------------------
The `toolchain.py` can create the initial Xcode project for you::
$ ./toolchain.py create <title> <app_directory>
$ ./toolchain.py create Touchtracer ~/code/kivy/examples/demo/touchtracer
Your app directory must contain a main.py. A directory named `<title>-ios`
will be created, with an Xcode project in it.
You can open the Xcode project using::
$ open touchtracer-ios/touchtracer.xcodeproj
Then click on `Play`, and enjoy.
.. note::
Everytime you press `Play`, your application directory will be synced to
the `<title>-ios/YourApp` directory. Don't make changes in the -ios
directory directly.
Configuring your App
--------------------
You can configure and customize your app in various ways:
#. Set the icon and launch images in XCode. Note that XCode requires that you
specify these assests per device or/and iOS version.
#. When you first build your XCode project, a 'main.m' file is created in your
XCode project folder. This file configures your environment variables and
controls your application startup. You can edit this file to customize your
launch environment.
#. Kivy uses SDL, and as soon as the application starts the SDL main, the launch
image will disappear. To prevent that, you need to have 2 files named
`Default.png` and `Default-Landscape.png`, and put them
in the `Resources` folder in Xcode (not in your application folder)
.. note::
If you wish to restrict your apps orientation, you should do this via
the 'export_orientation' function in 'main.m'. The XCode orientation
settings should be set to support all.
Using recipes
-------------
Recipes are used to install and compile any libraries you may need to use. These
recipes follow the same format as those used by the
[Python-for-Android](https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android) project.
Please refer to their
[recipe documentation](https://python-for-android.readthedocs.io/en/latest/recipes/)
for more details.
Reducing the application size
-----------------------------
If you would like to reduce the size of your distributed app, there are a few
things you can do to achieve this:
#. Minimize the `build/python/lib/python27.zip`: this contains all the python
modules. You can edit the zip file and remove all the files you'll not use
(reduce encodings, remove xml, email...)
#. Go to the settings panel > build, search for "strip" options, and
triple-check that they are all set to NO. Stripping does not work with
Python dynamic modules and will remove needed symbols.
#. By default, the iOS package compiles binaries for all processor
architectures, namely x86, x86_64, armv7 and arm64 as per the guidelines from
Apple. You can reduce the size of your ipa significantly by removing the
x86 and x86_64 architectures as they are usually used only for the emulator.
The procedure is to first compile/build all the host recipes as is::
./toolchain.py build hostpython
Then build all the rest of the recipes using --arch=armv7 --arch=arm64
arguments as follows::
./toolchain.py build kivy --arch=armv7 --arch=arm64
Note that these packages will not run in the iOS emulators, so use them
only for deployment.
FAQ
---
Fatal error: "stdio.h" file not found
You need to install the Command line tools: `xcode-select --install`
You must build with bitcode disabled (Xcode setting ENABLE_BITCODE should be No).
We don't support bitcode. You need to go to the project setting, and disable bitcode.
Support
-------
If you need assistance, you can ask for help on our mailing list:
* User Group : https://groups.google.com/group/kivy-users
* Email : kivy-users@googlegroups.com
We also have an IRC channel:
* Server : irc.freenode.net
* Port : 6667, 6697 (SSL only)
* Channel : #kivy
Contributing
------------
We love pull requests and discussing novel ideas. Check out our
`contribution guide <http://kivy.org/docs/contribute.html>`_ and
feel free to improve Kivy for iOS.
The following mailing list and IRC channel are used exclusively for
discussions about developing the Kivy framework and its sister projects:
* Dev Group : https://groups.google.com/group/kivy-dev
* Email : kivy-dev@googlegroups.com
IRC channel:
* Server : irc.freenode.net
* Port : 6667, 6697 (SSL only)
* Channel : #kivy-dev
License
-------
Kivy for iOS is released under the terms of the MIT License. Please refer to the
LICENSE file.
