Interacting with the iOS Simulator from the Command Line using simctl

Wasn’t aware of this, but turns out one can control (and interact with) the iOS Simulator straight from the command line.

There’s no need to install anything new though. The tool we’re going to be using is already on our Mac, hiding inside the xcrun command, which gets installed with Xcode.

It’s called simctl.

Here’s a few examples:

# open a URL
xcrun simctl openurl booted "https://littlebitesofcocoa.com"

# upload an image to the iOS Simulator
xcrun simctl addmedia booted ~/images/image1.png ~/images/image2.jpg

# Take a screenshot
xcrun simctl io booted screenshot ~/Desktop/screenshot.png

# Record a video
xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo --type=mp4 ~/Desktop/movie.mp4

Other commands include booting/stopping a device, clipboard operations, launching/terminating processes, installing/uninstalling apps, etc. — No touch events though, that would’ve been real fun.

Little bits of Cocoa: Interacting with the iOS Simulator using simctl →