Changing iOS Behavior Between Debug and Release

Oftentimes you will want your app to behave slightly differently during development and at release. For example, you may want to perform more logging, or use hard-coded or staging environment data. How can you detect whether your app is running in Debug or Release mode?

One quick precaution: it’s safest to minimize differences between your app in different environments, otherwise you risk not finding a production bug until the app is in the app store. To minimize the risk of this happening, instead of just making a change in the debug environment, it’s better to expose settings that allow you to toggle back and forth. For example, you might have a switch that allows you to toggle between staging and production data.

Here are the steps:

1. Create a custom swift compiler flag

Custom compiler flags allow you to change compilation behavior.

First, choose a name for the custom flag you will be setting, related to the feature you’ll be enabling or disabling. For example, on a project I used an ALLOW_STATIC_DATA flag, to allow using hard-coded data instead of a real backend. Feature-related flags are more flexible than a generic IS_PRODUCTION flag, because it more clearly documents what functionality is affected, and individual flags can be toggled rather than changing code.

In your project, select your app target, then under Build Settings > Other Swift Flags, add -D [your flag name]. Using the example above, it would be -D ALLOW STATIC DATA. You can add the flag in only Debug, only Release, or both.

2. Check the flag in conditional compilation blocks

Swift provides an #if macro that can check compiler flags and conditionally include code:

#if ALLOW_STATIC_DATA
  // ...
#else
  // ...
#endif