Capacitor: Adding IOS Entitlements without using Xcode

Question

I'm working on an iOS app created using Capacitor and Ionic. I've built my iOS app and have manually submitted it to Apple Store / TestFlight via xcode, but during that process I had to manually add an entitlement to my app. The process in the Capacitor docs, where you edit the app entitlements in xcode, worked just fine for me. However, I would ideally like to not keep my full iOS app in source control, and as such, I would like to add my entitlements via something like the capacitor.config.json file.

so: Is it possible to set the iOS app entitlements via the capacitor.config.json file? Something like:

{
    "appId": "com.app.name",
    "appName": "app name",
    "bundledWebRuntime": false,
    "cordova":
    {
        "android":
        {
            ...
        },
        "ios":
        {
            "entitlements":{
                ...
            }
            "preferences":
            {
                ...
            }
        },
        "preferences":
        {
            ...
        }
    },
    "npmClient": "npm"
}

If it's not, is this something that I can edit in my ci pipeline, like the android or iOS app version? I'm using a script to set the version in the android manifest / ios info.plist in my azure build pipeline. I would assume editing the AppRelease.entitlements file would work pretty similarly, being an xml file.

Ionic / Cap Versions:

> ionic info

   Ionic:

   Ionic CLI       : 6.16.3 
   Ionic Framework : @ionic/react 4.11.13

Capacitor:

   Capacitor CLI      : 2.4.7
   @capacitor/android : 2.4.7
   @capacitor/core    : 2.4.7
   @capacitor/ios     : 2.4.7

Utility:

   cordova-res : not installed globally
   native-run  : not installed globally

System:

   NodeJS : v12.16.1 
   npm    : 6.13.4
   OS     : macOS Big Sur 

Answer 1

The way I have done that in the past is by using xcodebuild with an exportOptionsRelease.plist file.

xcodebuild -exportArchive -archivePath Release.xcarchive -exportPath Release -exportOptionsPlist exportOptionsRelease.plist

You should also probably consider keeping the iOS project in source control. Might save you headaches later. Capacitor even recommends it.