Getting Started
Assuming you already have Swift installed in your system (that is, if you run whereis swift, you should see /usr/bin/swift), running scripts in Swift is pretty easy.
The process of writing Swift script is similar to that of bash script or python script.
Create/touch main.swift (it must be named main), and write the following hello code:
#!/usr/bin/swift
print("Hello Swift!")
The first line is the hashbang commonly seen in other scripting languages, which points to our Swift REPL.
To run:
chmod +x main.swift
./main.swift
This will print “Hello Swift!”.
Compiling to Binary
In Getting Started, we have a swift file that compile on the fly.
We could compile that into an executable binary.
swiftc main.swift -o hello
We name the binary hello in above. The binary will be created, and now you can run it with ./hello.
If you get an error cannot load underlying module for 'CoreGraphics' (if you start to import frameworks like Foundation), then you will need to run like this:
xcrun -sdk macosx main.swift -o hello
Swift version manager
If you have used rvm for ruby, we have the equivalent chswift, by @neonichu from Cocoapods.
Taking a step further, @neonichu created cato, which let you run script with hashbang directive that specify the Swift version to run with:
#!/usr/bin/env cato 1.2
There is also swiftenv, another Swift Version Manager, which is more popular likely because it has much similarities to pyenv.
Dependency Manager
Cocoapods has a rome version that will build frameworks for Swift scripts to use.
Install with:
gem install cocoapods-rome
Till further, that’s all for an introduction.