Swift on Linux CI/CD using swiftly

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

As Swift developers, we tend to focus exclusively on developing Swift packages for Apple platforms but the truth is that Swift is now a cross-platform language and we should embrace it where possible by making our Swift packages available to Linux clients too.

Ensuring that our Swift packages are compatible with Linux is not always an easy task and can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. To build a package for Linux, we need to set up a development environment locally, usually using Docker, or have a dedicated machine running Linux that we can test our code on.

Furthermore, if we do this process manually and Linux is not our primary development environment, we run the risk of forgetting to check that our code still compiles for Linux every time we make a change.

But this is where automation truly shines. In this article, I will show you how you can set up a CI/CD workflow running on the latest version of Ubuntu using GitHub Actions that installs Swift, builds a Swift package and runs its unit tests.

Setting up the workflow

The first thing to do is to set up a new workflow in your GitHub repository. You can do this by creating a new yml file in the .github/workflows directory of your repository.

The name of the file can be anything you want but it must have the .yml extension. For example, you can call it linux.yml.

This file is responsible for telling GitHub Actions when it needs to run, where it needs to run and what actions it needs to execute when it does:

name: Linux
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  run-danger:
    name: Build and run tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

The workflow above just tells the system it needs to run on the latest version of Ubuntu when new changes are pushed to the main branch but does not specify any actions to execute other than just cloning the repository.

Installing Swift using swiftly

Swiftly is an open-source CLI tool built and maintained by the Swift Server Workgroup (SSWG) that allows you to install, manage and switch between different Swift toolchain versions.

Aside from being very easy to use and being inspired by rustup, which I am a big fan of, it is entirely written in Swift 🎉❤️.

⚠️ Swiftly is still in its early stages of development and is currently only available for Linux but, as stated in their README, they are planning on adding support for macOS in the future as well.

Let’s add a step to install swiftly in our workflow:

name: Linux
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  run-danger:
    name: Build and run tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Install swiftly
      shell: bash
      run: curl -L https://swift-server.github.io/swiftly/swiftly-install.sh | bash -s -- -y

Something very important you need to keep in mind is that, by default, swiftly will run an interactive shell script that will ask the user whether they want to customise the installation or not.

This behaviour is not supported by CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions, so we need to turn off the confirmation dialogue by passing the -y (or --disable-confirmation) flag to the script.

And then a second step to install the latest Swift toolchain:

name: Linux
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  run-danger:
    name: Build and run tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Install swiftly
      shell: bash
      run: curl -L https://swift-server.github.io/swiftly/swiftly-install.sh | bash -s -- -y
    - name: Install the latest Swift toolchain
      run: swiftly install latest

Building and testing the Swift package

All that’s left to do now is to add a step to build and test our Swift package:

name: Linux
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  run-danger:
    name: Build and run tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Install swiftly
      shell: bash
      run: curl -L https://swift-server.github.io/swiftly/swiftly-install.sh | bash -s -- -y
    - name: Install the latest Swift toolchain
      run: swiftly install latest
    - name: Build and run the unit tests
      run: swift test

That’s it, next time you do a push to the main branch, GitHub Actions will build and run the unit tests for your Swift package on Linux: