Install xcdiff with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• xcdiff

Project history

The project appeared publicly in the Xcode project-generation era, when teams increasingly used tools such as XcodeGen and Tuist to generate .xcodeproj files rather than editing them entirely by hand. Swift Package Index records xcdiff's first public release, 0.2.0, on 22 October 2019, and the GitHub releases page shows continued maintenance through the 0.14.0 release in September 2025.

xcdiff builds on other Swift/Xcode infrastructure instead of parsing project files in isolation. The README credits Tuist's XcodeProj library and Swift Package Manager's utility library, which places xcdiff in the same small ecosystem of tools that inspect, generate, or normalize Xcode project metadata.

Adoption history

The project is niche by design: it is aimed at teams that need to compare two generated or hand-maintained Xcode projects in a meaningful way. Swift Package Index lists xcdiff as an active package with one executable, two libraries, and roughly a thousand GitHub stars, indicating modest but real use among Swift and Apple-platform tooling users.

How it is used

The canonical workflow is to run `xcdiff` in a directory containing two .xcodeproj files, or to pass two project paths explicitly with `-p1` and `-p2`. The README's main use case is migration to project generation: compare a generated project against the original one and inspect differences in targets, sources, headers, and related project structure.

Beyond the CLI, xcdiff exposes XCDiffCore as a Swift Package Manager dependency. That makes it useful for package-nerd workflows where a team wants project-file comparison inside another migration, review, or CI tool rather than only as terminal output.

Why package nerds care

Xcode projects are serialized as large property-list-like graphs, so ordinary text diffs are noisy and often misleading. xcdiff matters in its niche because it treats the project file as structured data, which helps teams review generated-project changes without hand-reading unstable .pbxproj ordering and identifiers.

Timeline

• 2019-10-22: Swift Package Index records xcdiff 0.2.0 as the first public release.
• 2021-01-22: xcdiff 0.6.0 adds additional comparators, including Swift Package and project attributes.
• 2025-09-08: GitHub releases list xcdiff 0.14.0 as a current release.

Related projects

• XcodeGen and Tuist are named by the README as project-generation tools whose output can be checked with xcdiff.
• Tuist's XcodeProj library is credited by xcdiff and provides the underlying Xcode project modeling used in the wider Swift tooling ecosystem.

Sources

• https://github.com/bloomberg/xcdiff#readme
• https://github.com/bloomberg/xcdiff/releases
• https://swiftpackageindex.com/bloomberg/xcdiff