MacOS

When working on an iOS app you may sometimes need to inspect or debug the network traffic between the app and the server to see what exactly is going on. Or you may be just curious to see what data other apps send about you to their servers. The way to achieve this is to run a proxy on your computer and route all the traffic from your iOS device through that proxy.

mitmproxy

Mitmproxy is a free and open source interactive HTTPS proxy. The UX is not as great as in paid app like Charles, but it is still good enough.

Installing and running

You install mitmproxy from homebrew

brew install mitmproxy

and run the command line interface with a simple mitmproxy proxy command. The command line interface takes some time to get used to. If you want something simpler, run the mitmweb command to get a web interface.

Setting up the iOS device

Proxy

When you have mitmproxy or mitmweb running you now need to set your iOS device to use that proxy. On your iOS device, go to Settings | Wi-Fi and to the properties of your Wi-Fi network. Switch the HTTP Proxy to manual and set the it to the IP address of your computer running mitmproxy and port 8080.

If you are a macOS user you may be used to Time Machine as the standard for backups. Time Machine is fine if you want to backup your files and configuration, but if for example your disk dies or your hackintosh completely breaks with some bad update, there are better and faster ways to get it up and running again.

Requirements

Basically everything comes down to your backup requirements. These are mine

• full backup of the macOS SSD including EFI with Clover
• backups that can be restored without any additional configuration to the current macOS SSD or a new one in case of a disk failure
• no need for the ability to restore single files (all work data are in Git and Dropbox)
• reasonable backup and restore speed

Looking at different backup solutions I chose Clonezilla. It is not exactly the most user-friendly solution, but it is a very powerful one if you know what you are doing.

If you run macOS side by side with Windows or have some drives formated with NTFS, you may not want them to get automatically mounted when you start macOS. I have a Windows 10 SSD with NFTS and a data HDD with NTFS next to my macOS SSD and I do not use any o those two drivers when booted in macOS, so I was looking for a way to have them not mounted at startup.

The main reason for this other than them not being shown in Finder is that macOS spins the data HDD from time to time for no apparent reason and I really do not want this.

In a classic Linux system you could edit /etc/fstab. This file can be also created on macOS, but Apple does not recommend editing it directly but to use sudo vifs. The drives should be addressed by their UUID as opposed to their “location” on Linux, so you first have to find that UUIDs.

When you have the drivers mounted, run diskutil info /Volumes/"Volume name" | grep 'Volume UUID' where “Volumne name” is the volume name as shown in Finder. This will get you just the UUID.

Visual Studio Code is a neat editor with many good functionalities but I especially like the way it shows Git merge conflicts. Instead of a 2-way or a 3-way split it just shows one window with both changes, nicely highlighted with colors and actions.

I like this feature so much I decided to set Visual Studio Code as my Git merge tool for both the command line and Git Tower.

Command line

Using Visual Studio Code as a merge tool for Git when using command line means editing your .gitconfig. You just need to define a new tool called code and set it as the default merge tool.

[merge]
        tool = vscode
[mergetool "vscode"]
        cmd = code --wait $MERGED

If you use Continuous Integration (CI) builds or build your app from the command line using xcodebuild you know that the output is not pretty and not very readable. Reading the build output is important when a CI build breaks, but it is not easy when it looks like this

Many iOS developers were not satisfied with this so the xcpretty project was created. Xcpretty is a fast and flexible formatter that turn the output from screnshot above to this neatly formatted output