Hawk

Hawk is a simple iOS ad-hoc distribution tool. Deployments are lightweight, backed by S3 storage (sourced from your own AWS account), and notifications of new builds happen via email. Beyond an AWS account and an S3 bucket, the only moving parts to hawk are on your machine. Hawk is a lightweight, low-friction way to make ad-hoc deploys easy.

Installation

Install hawk on your machine by either running gem install hawk, or else by including it in your application's Gemfile. Once it's installed run

$ hawkify

in your application's top-level directory to create a Hawkfile (if one doesn't already exist). Open up Hawkfile in your editor of choice and follow the comments therein to set it up to your liking.

Usage

Once your Hawkfile is customized, you're ready to go. You can create and deploy an ad-hoc build of your app by running 

$ hawk

from any folder inside your application. This will do the following:

  1. Build your app for distribution (using the Release build configuration)
  2. Sign your app for ad-hoc distribution (according to the Release code signing identity in your project)
  3. Upload your app and some associated metadata to S3, using the credentials you specify in your Hawkfile
  4. Draft an email with a pre-populated body (once again taken from your Hawkfile) and open it using your local mail application, ready for you to edit and send at your leisure

Hawk automatically includes any required provisioning profiles inside the deployed app, so users don't need to do anything beyond clicking on the link that hawk sends out. There's no client-side app to install, no servers to run, no accounts to set up. It just works.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Fork this repo and submit a pull request (or just open up a ticket and I'll see what I can do).