How can I display the application version revision in my application's settings bundle?

There is another solution that can be much simpler than either of the previous answers. Apple bundles a command-line tool called PlistBuddy inside most of its installers, and has included it in Leopard at /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy.

Since you want to replace VersionValue, assuming you have the version value extracted into $newVersion, you could use this command:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set :VersionValue $newVersion" /path/to/Root.plist

No need to fiddle with sed or regular expressions, this approach is quite straightforward. See the man page for detailed instructions. You can use PlistBuddy to add, remove, or modify any entry in a property list. For example, a friend of mine blogged about incrementing build numbers in Xcode using PlistBuddy.

Note: If you supply just the path to the plist, PlistBuddy enters interactive mode, so you can issue multiple commands before deciding to save changes. I definitely recommend doing this before plopping it in your build script.

My lazy man's solution was to update the version number from my application code. You could have a default (or blank) value in the Root.plist and then, somewhere in your startup code:

NSString *version = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] objectForKey:@"CFBundleVersion"];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] setObject:version forKey:@"version_preference"];

The only catch is that your app would have to be run at least once for the updated version to appear in the settings panel.

You could take the idea further and update, for instance, a counter of how many times your app has been launched, or other interesting bits of information.

Based on @Quinn's answer, here the full process and working code I use to do this.

• Add a settings bundle to your app. Don't rename it.
• Open Settings.bundle/Root.plist in a text editor

Replace the contents with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"     "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>PreferenceSpecifiers</key>
    <array>
        <dict>
            <key>Title</key>
            <string>About</string>
            <key>Type</key>
            <string>PSGroupSpecifier</string>
        </dict>
        <dict>
            <key>DefaultValue</key>
            <string>DummyVersion</string>
            <key>Key</key>
            <string>version_preference</string>
            <key>Title</key>
            <string>Version</string>
            <key>Type</key>
            <string>PSTitleValueSpecifier</string>
        </dict>
    </array>
    <key>StringsTable</key>
    <string>Root</string>
</dict>
</plist>

• Create a Run Script build phase, move to be after the Copy Bundle Resources phase. Add this code:

  cd "${BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR}"
  buildVersion=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print CFBundleVersion" "${INFOPLIST_PATH}" )
  /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set PreferenceSpecifiers:1:DefaultValue $buildVersion" "${WRAPPER_NAME}/Settings.bundle/Root.plist"
  

• Replace MyAppName with your actual app's name, and the 1 after PreferenceSpecifiers to be the index of your Version entry in the Settings. The above Root.plist example has it at index 1.