Contributing to SideStore

Thank you for your interest in contributing to SideStore! SideStore is a community driven project, and it's made possible by people like you.

There are many ways to contribute to SideStore, so if you aren't a developer, there are still many other ways you can help out:

Writing documentation
Submitting detailed bug reports and suggesting new features
Helping out with support
- Discord
- GitHub Discussions

However, this guide will focus on the development side of things. For now, we will only have setup information here, but you can join our Discord if you need help after setup.

Requirements

This guide assumes you:

are on a Mac
have Xcode installed
have basic command line knowledge (know how to run commands, cd into a directory)
have basic Git knowledge (GitHub Desktop is a great tool for beginners, and greatly simplifies working with Git)
have basic Swift/iOS development knowledge

Setup

Fork the SideStore repo on GitHub.
Clone the fork: git clone https://github.com/<your github username>/SideStore.git --recurse-submodules

If you are using GitHub Desktop, refer to this guide.
Copy CodeSigning.xcconfig.sample to CodeSigning.xcconfig and fill in the values.
(Development only) Change the value for ALTDeviceID in the Info.plist to your device's UDID. Normally, SideServer embeds the device's UDID in SideStore's Info.plist during installation. When running through Xcode you'll need to set the value yourself or else SideStore won't resign (or even install) apps for the proper device. You can achieve this by changing a few things to be able to build and use SideStore.
Finally, open AltStore.xcodeproj in Xcode.

Next, make and test your changes. Then, commit and push your changes using git and make a pull request.

Prebuilt binary information

minimuxer and em_proxy use prebuilt static library binaries built by GitHub Actions to speed up builds and remove the need for Rust to be installed when working on SideStore. Dependencies/fetch-prebuilt.sh will be run before each build by Xcode, and it will check if the downloaded binaries are up-to-date once every 6 hours. If you want to force it to check for new binaries, run bash ./Dependencies/fetch-prebuilt.sh force.

Building an IPA for distribution

You can use the Makefile: make build fakesign ipa

This will create SideStore.ipa.

Warning

The binary created will contain paths to Xcode's DerivedData, and if you built minimuxer on your machine, paths to $HOME/.cargo. This will include your username. If you want to keep your user's username private, you might want to get GitHub Actions to build the IPA instead.

Developing minimuxer alongside SideStore

Please see minimuxer's README for development instructions.

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