Automatically merging conflicts in Xcode project files

Dealing with code conflicts is somethings every developer is probably used to, but it is never a good experience, especially when dealing with file formats that are not exactly human readable, like Xcode project files.

The Xcode projects files (project.pbxproj) are a proper mess with every file appearing multiple times, being referenced by an id, etc .. definitely not something you would want to deal with manually. Luckily there is a better way.

Kintsugi

Kintsugi is lightweight tool to automatically resolve Git conflicts that occur in Xcode project files. You install the Kintsugi gem with

gem install kintsugi

and then simply calling it a path to a project as a parameter.

For example if you have a merge conflicts in App/project.pbxproj you execute

kintsugi App/project.pbxproj

and Kintsugi will take care of the conflicts for you.

I have been using Kintsugi for a few weeks now and I have to say it works really well. There was only one time so far it failed to automatically merge a conflicts I had in an Xcode project file.