Usually my crash logs get symbolicated on external services like Fabric or Firebase but from time to time it’s more convenient for me to symbolicate on my local machine. I used to use a pair of clunky tools to achieve it but fortunately there is quite hidden but easy to use tool from Xcode that can be used almost out of the box. 😏

First I had to add the location of crashsymbolicate into my PATH to be able to access the tool from any place in my prompt. By the way, I use Zsh and Oh My Zsh I can recommend it to all “more or less” power users of macOS. The easier way to do so is to edit ~/.zshrc file:

vim ~/.zshrc

We extend our PATH with an additional export PATH part of the config. crashsymbolicate is a part of DVTFoundation but requires an additional export to the currently used Xcode’s path. The easiest way to do so is to set $(xcode-select --print-path). It should be assigned to DEVELOPER_DIR variable. Note that we separate paths in the PATH variable by a colon (:) and in Bash we don’t accept whitespace to be inserted between the name of a variable and its value.

# We assign PATH to what we previously have in PATH and the path to DVTFoundation framework separated by a colon
export PATH=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources:$PATH
# We add an additional variable used by crashsymbolicate
export DEVELOPER_DIR=$(xcode-select --print-path)

If you still use Bash you can find your PATH variable defined in ~/.bashrc file:

vim ~/.bashrc

Now we can simply go to the location of our crashlog, copy the dSYM into the same location and run the script.

If you don’t have dSYM file, it can be found on App Store (formerly iTunes) Connect. Go to your application page, and on Activity tab click on a build and under Includes Symbols you should see Download dSYM link. If there is none, then you probably should check your build script. It is important to download dSYM from App Store Connect if you build with enabled bitcode (and it is enabled by default), because your binary is recompiled on App Store side and there is no other way to get those dSYMs then from App Store web service. If you don’t use bitcode you can use dSYM generated with your build process.

symbolicatecrash MyApp.crash MyApp.app.dSYM > desymbolicated.crash

As you can see I use > to save the result of sybolicatecrash to a file. Thanks for that desymbolicated.crash can be used with Xcode or analyzed in more readable form. 🙌