Since we moved our OS X infrastructure to a new setup last year, we’ve made many improvements and expanded our catalog of supported OS X and Xcode versions. We want to continue this trend of improvements and enhancements, so we’re making a couple changes.

Time for a new default

One thing we haven’t changed since we switch was that our default OS X image is still OS X 10.9/Xcode 6.1 (osx_image: beta-xcode6.1) nor has the image recieved a lot of userland updates. In order to help improve our users’ default experience for OSX builds and improve our ability to make more frequent updates, we will be promoting our Xcode 7.3 image to our default build environment image at 08:00 PST on Monday, October 3rd, 2016.

We will update the Xcode 7.3 image with brew update, pod setup, and similar updates to common tools that help speed up build times, within 24 hours before we promote the image, so things will be very up to date in the new environment.

In a few days we’ll be publishing an FAQ about the new default environment, including a detailed comparison of the changes in software versions between our Xcode 6.4 images and the Xcode 7.3 image. We’ll publish a blog post with the FAQ and links to relevant documentation once it is ready.

Simplifying our process by retiring some images

In order to give users who explicitly use some of our less common Xcode versions, we’ll be maintaining all the current images through Monday, October 31st. On Oct. 31 we will be simplifying our image catalog to the following three available options:

• osx_image: xcode6.4 (with 10.10)
• osx_image: xcode7.3 (with 10.11 and default)
• osx_image: xcode8 (currently 10.11, but tentatively planned to be 10.12 for this release)

We may extend this time period, based on user feedback, and we will begin displaying a warning message to users who have explicitly chosen one of the less common Xcode versions in the first week of October.

Questions?

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to email support@travis-ci.com