How to start debugserver on an iPhone from CLI?

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Level 1

4 points

How to start debugserver on an iPhone from CLI?

Hello,

I would like to debug my apps using lldb from the command line by starting the remote session on my iPhone.

It works perfectly when debugging on the simulator. However, to connect to a remote server it is required to first start the server on the device side.

Xcode somehow performs this operation, but I wasn't able to find any CLI tool (browsed all /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin tools) to do that.

Here is also a very similar topic created by someone else:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72924217/is-it-possible-to-launch-an-iphone-debugserver-without-jailbreaking-using-lldb-o

Is it possible to do that or does Xcode use some protected protocol to start the server?

Posted on Feb 17, 2024 4:21 AM

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Answer 1

Maxikq Author

Level 1

4 points

Feb 17, 2024 8:26 AM in response to MrHoffman

Hi, thank you for your suggestion. However, this tool is mostly dead, deploying doesn’t work well (and there are already easy and fast native ways to do that) and debugging doesn’t work at all, at least in my case.

However, maybe I will try to browse the code to see how debugging is done.

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Answer 2

MrHoffman

Level 10

148,569 points

Feb 17, 2024 7:05 AM in response to Maxikq

Maybe deploy the bundle with debugging from the command line, using this tool:

https://github.com/ios-control/ios-deploy

ios-deploy --debug --bundle my.app

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