macOS Monterey images

Ecosystem CircleCI Images
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Hi, I was wondering when macOS Monterey images will be available for use.

Our development team is currently transitioning to M1 Pro/Max machines which ship with macOS Monterey and for consistency devs on Intel machines will likely be upgrading too.

Ideally, we need our CI environment to match our development environment - in particular certain types of tests like snapshot tests require a consistent environment. Access to Monterey images will be crucial for us.

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Hi, we are waiting for the next Xcode release (13.3) from Apple, but they don’t issue any ETAs for Xcode releases. This will ship with macOS 12 as the underlying OS version

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@bytesguy thanks for the reply - out of interest what’s the reason for the delay until Xcode 13.3, given that we don’t yet know when that will be released? Monterey has been out nearly 4 months now.

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4

Hi, there are multiple factors for us to consider here.

  1. We do not retroactively update already published images unless there is a breaking issue or security concern. Therefore we will not be “upgrading” any already released images to macOS 12.

  2. At the time of the Xcode 13.2.0 release, the macOS 12 images we were working on were not stable enough to release.

  3. The last image was Xcode 13.2.1 which replaced Xcode 13.2.0 and therefore, as it was a patch version, we would not update the macOS major version in this release.

  4. Until the past few days, thanks to the deprecation and removal of some old images, we did not have capacity to release a standalone, out of band, macOS 12 image for testing.

  5. Now that we do have the capacity, we need to consider that it has been around 6 weeks since the last Xcode release and going by Apples release cadence we can likely expect a new Xcode, or beta version, shortly. It makes the most sense for us to roll the macOS 12 update into the next image that we release, rather than release a separate macOS 12 version of the Xcode 13.2.1 image as that image will likely be short-lived.

With that said, as it has been just over 3 months since macOS 12 was released, we are considering releasing a standalone preview image if there is no Xcode release by the end of this week.

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Thanks for the detailed response. With Xcode 13.3 out now I look forward to seeing a preview image so we can start testing.

One last question - do you have any plans for Apple Silicon machines? It looks like some of our snapshot issues are to do with rendering differences across architectures.

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No problem. Xcode 13.3 beta 1 should be live on Monday and will come with macOS 12.2

As for M1, we don’t have anything to share at the moment, but you can use Runner on your own M1 hosts:

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Just following up on this, the macOS 12 image is out. Information can be found here: