Rubymotion: Controlling Info.plist generation with environment variables

I've been doing a fair amount of Rubymotion development these days and one trick that I'm using in my local development is to control the generation of the Info.plist via environment variables and some Ruby coding in the Rakefile. I can't stop raving about the excellent tools and development cadence that Rubymotion affords the iOS developer. I really like that I'm working out of Rubymine and not Xcode and using standard Ruby tools like rake and Bundler.

Like I said, using rake, you have the opportunity to change your Info.plist because it's generated through the rake process. I have a login view that needs a username and password entered into the text fields. I've rigged it up that these are prepopulated when working in dev, using environment variables and adding some logic to my Rakefile and the view controller. First up are the environment variables:

export DEV_MODE="true"
export DEV_USERNAME="chris.bartling@mycompany.net"
export DEV_PASSWORD="fahj2734hfjg86776dg$48df676"

Nothing earth shattering here. Normal environment variable assignments. Next up is the Rakefile changes:

Motion::Project::App.setup do |app|
    
	...    

    if ENV['DEV_MODE']
        puts '==========================================='
        puts '===> Using DEV_MODE Info.plist values <===='
        puts '==========================================='

        app.info_plist['DEV_USERNAME'] = ENV['DEV_USERNAME']
        app.info_plist['DEV_PASSWORD'] = ENV['DEV_PASSWORD']
    end

    app.pods do
        ....
    end
end

Again, pretty simple Ruby stuff here. If the DEV_HOME environment variable is set, add the username and password to the Info.plist during generation. Now, in your app, you can reference these values in your viewDidLoad method of your view controller, prepopulating the UI elements in your views:

dev_username = NSBundle.mainBundle.objectForInfoDictionaryKey('DEV_USERNAME')
dev_password = NSBundle.mainBundle.objectForInfoDictionaryKey('DEV_PASSWORD')
@email_field.text = dev_username || ''
@password_field.text = dev_password || ''

I probably sound like a broken record, but if you haven't used Rubymotion, definitely give it a try. Much different developer experience using Rubymotion tools vs. Apple's Xcode tooling.