MacStadium Blog

Learn how to use the Automator app and launchd to control automated startup and login actions on macOS.

Managing Mac VM images is simple with Orka. Learn about image storage, and walk through a sample workflow with the Orka CLI.

MacStadium offers the latest VMware ESXi running on certified Apple hardware in the cloud. Learn how to spin up your first VMware VM on macOS in this post.

Learn how to securely connect to a VMware environment at MacStadium, which offers the latest stable version of the VMware ESXi hypervisor on dedicated hardware.

Xcode projects, workspaces, targets and schemes -- better understand what each of these arguments means in an xcodebuild command.

A major theme at this year’s MacDevOpsYVR conference was the emphasis on security across the macOS DevOps space.

Flaky CI tests can hurt developer confidence, and ultimately your team’s bottom line. Learn about common causes of flaky tests and how to resolve them.

Are you ready to move your iOS and macOS CI to the cloud? We’ve got three virtualization platforms to choose from: Orka, VMware and Anka.

Follow this simple guide to add a MacStadium hosted Mac mini as a build agent to an existing Jenkins master.

Learn about how containerizing portions of parallel CI/CD pipelines can help you reduce tool sprawl and your DevOps tool footprint.

Use these five resources to adhere to the best practice of separating your code from your project configurations by breaking them out into standalone xcconfig files.

Learn how to set up a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner on a macOS compute resource hosted by MacStadium for simple, secure iOS and macOS CI.

Managing hybrid CI/CD pipelines built on Orka with Ansible just got easier. Use our Ansible Dynamic Inventory plugin script to efficiently manage hybrid CI/CD pipelines built on Orka.

The results of the 2020 iOS Developer Community Survey are out, we’re investigating the rise in popularity of SwiftUI over the past year and what's driving this change.

MacStadium has data centers in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley and Dublin, Ireland. Learn about latency and how it may play into your choice of a data center location with MacStadium.

Unlock your iOS and macOS CI build hardware’s full potential with these simple, free, automatable optimizations.

Free and open source software is a major driver of innovation in the iOS and macOS space. Learn how MacStadium supports these essential contributions and how your open source project can benefit as well!

If you are virtualizing macOS in VMware, it may be time to upgrade your environment. Xcode 12.5 is out in beta, and we have a rundown of the compatible VMware versions, and the steps to take to upgrade to them.

DevSecOps integrates security into the full software development lifecycle to better lock down potential attack vectors and to avoid catastrophe.

Did you know that you can connect external cloud resources to a MacStadium cloud? Use a secure site-to-site VPN connection to integrate your Mac DevOps pipeline to Azure, AWS, or GCP.

Are you looking for a new job in 2021? We’ve assembled some of the best places to find developer jobs. Whether you want a change or just checking out the market, we’ve got some of the best resources for your search.

Jenkins and Orka are the perfect match for building your ephemeral CI pipeline for iOS - and we’ve written up a guide to make the journey even easier.

As developers, we know you’re always working to level up your skills. We’ve got some of our favorite (and your favorite) repos for Swift.

We get asked a lot about how to store secrets inside of Orka. It’s not always needed, but if you want to, we have a step-by-step guide for building your own custom solution.

Contemplating switching from static to ephemeral, or using a hybrid model? We’ve got three pitfalls to avoid and an eBook with questions to help make your dream iOS CI pipeline a reality.

In this post, we’ll take a look at using Buildkite to connect a GitHub account with Orka, and run a static CI/CD pipeline.

How are you testing your apps? In this blog post, we discuss the pros and cons of three different forms of testing: simulators, emulators, and physical devices.

Jenkins is the most popular open-source CI/CD tool available - and we’ve got a plugin for it! Take a look at our step-by-step guide to getting the MacStadium Jenkins plugin for Orka up and running.

In part 2, learn to incorporate an additional Groovy Init Hook script that will install and configure the Orka plugin for Jenkins.

Mac, Linux, or Windows? Swift can run in all three places, so which are you picking? Our rundown can give you some guidance when you’re looking to run Swift!

GitHub Actions, first released in 2019, is a free CI/CD system baked into GitHub. Grab your GitHub repo and see what you can do with GitHub Actions and your MacStadium hardware.

In our latest installment of the How to K8s series, we explore the concepts you’ll need to execute tasks via a look at dockerizing a Jenkins server so that it can create a user automatically upon startup in a container.

Ansible is a lightweight configuration solution that requires only two things of the target servers it configures. We’re walking through Jeff Geerling’s Ansible playbook on the blog to show you how Ansible can benefit you.

iOS 14 has a brand new feature called App Clips. Get ready to explore this new, mini-versions of iOS apps as we explore what you can expect from these cool new tools.

If you’re looking to get started with Ansible, you’ve come to the right place! We’re diving into automation with Ansible for the introductory blog post.

Last time, we dove into the ins and outs of Kubernetes Secrets, but in the latest How to K8s, we’ll cover creating a Secret via kubectl CLI.

In this last installment of Dave Verwer’s iOS Developer Community Survey, we’re turning our analytical eye to what iOS developers are working on both personally and professionally.

What is a Kubernetes Secret and can you make sure that all your secrets are being kept? In this blog, we give you an overview of what Kubernetes Secrets are and how to make them.

Pods, ReplicaSets, and Deployments are definitely something new and returning users will need to have in their K8s playbook. Let us guide you on the K8s journey with our latest installment.

VNC, SSH, or VPN, you can interact with a Mac mini remotely in several different ways. In this how-to, we walk you through different ways you can access your Mac mini - including our recommendations.

We’re back with Part 2 of our analysis of Dave Verwer’s iOS Developer Community Survey. In this installment, we talk tools - from Swift to Objective-C and from Jenkins to Bazel, here’s what developers are using.

In order to retain data beyond the life-cycle of a given Pod in Kubernetes, you’ll have to use a persistent volume. In this walkthrough, we’ll take you through the complexities of persistent volumes and claims.

Set sail with K8s with part four in the How to K8s series! Let us take you through how to pull, edit, and push a Docker image.

In part three of our How to K8s series, we take you through emptyDir and volume, and how to share data between containers in a pod.

Jump into part one of our Chef series, where we introduce some concepts and ideas for beginners and discuss the latest update to the Chef training materials.

There are a lot of players in the iOS testing landscape. We’ve picked four open source platforms for your consideration.

In the second installment of How to K8s, we explore how to use a Kubernetes load balance service to expose a single IP.

Dave Verwer’s iOS Developer Community Survey came out a couple of months ago, and we’ve been looking over the data ever since. In part 1, we look at where iOS devs keep their Macs.

When working with Kubernetes environments, you may find it useful to access a pod directly. You can do that by calling kubectl exec to get direct command line access.

Dive into the costs and benefits when choosing between ephemeral and static build agents. Learn the key differences and why you may want to choose one method over the other.

MacStadium's Orka brings modern, orchestration and containerization solutions Kubernetes and Docker to Mac-specific CI. Now, teams that focus on dev for iOS and macOS have access to this powerful tech.

Manipulating virtual machines has become a core skill for DevOps engineers. Orka allows for automated management of macOS VMs with simple commands.

Xcode’s latest release, 11.4 Beta 3, has brought advancements across the board. Here’s our rundown of the two new features we love and think could benefit you the most.

The Orka demo gives you two hours of playtime to experience the power of Orka. Here's how to get the most out of your demo environment.

It’s always a treat when you can do more with less code. And Orka’s CLI fits this bill. Orka is a powerful macOS virtualization tool that performs complex tasks with short, simple commands.

These three plugins are the most recent additions to Orka, and have all been greeted warmly by folks who are using them already. Check out how Orka integrates with your CI pipeline (part 2).

With Orka’s simple CLI and our growing library of plugins and integrations, ease-of-use is central to our targeted user experience. In short, Orka is a tool for everyone.

Leveraging ephemeral builds as part of your CI pipeline greatly improves consistency, scalability, and ease of updating. In this post, learn how to connect your build server to shared storage.

If you haven’t yet heard much about YAML, it – very much like JSON or XML – is just a way of representing structured data. Learn more in this beginner's guide.

Is CI automation on your team's wishlist for 2020? Check out this piece for three must-have tools before getting started.

With one or more of our five storage solutions your team will be ready and able to focus on the work at hand. We break them down in this piece.

A collection of our favorite resources based on specific use cases to help you make a well informed choice as to which route to take in the creation of your next application.

Your company is growing and there are many factors contributing to the need for a more efficient CI infrastructure. Learn how MacStadium can aid in the transition to an infrastructure that can support a product at scale.

Is your homegrown Mac mini build farm keeping pace with your organizational growth? If you're not sure, the MacStadium team has put together the top five signs it's time to make a change for the better.

We have recently expanded our Mac private cloud Site-to-Site Networking documentation to include specific setup instructions.

Provisioning your Mac cloud virtual machines for macOS and iOS CI just got easier. MacStadium engineers have put together some example Ansible scripts for provisioning your CI build environment.