Alloy includes a simple jake app-runner script that you can use to test the sample apps (the test apps included with Alloy). You must run the jake app:run command from your Alloy repo directory. It requires one additional argument -- dir -- which points to the app's folder within test/apps.

In general form:

# general form
jake app:run dir=folder/appname

# for example
jake app:run dir=ui/tableview

You can pass any command-line argument supported by the ti build command (see the docs) with these caveats:

• Do not include the single or double-dashes specified by the ti build command docs.
• You must separate the argument and values with an equals sign, not a space.
• The p or platform argument defaults to iphone for OS X users and android for Windows or Linux users. So, you can omit that argument if the default is suitable.
• If the ti build option expects no value (such as its --tall flag), you must specify a true value when using it with the jake command.
• You can use either the sdk or tiversion argument to specify the CLI version to use with the build command. See note below.

Starting with SDK 3.4.0 and Xcode 6, you must target a desired simulator by its UUID.

# to get a list of UUIDs
ti info -t ios

# then build to a specific one
# this UUID corresponds to an iPad2 sim on my system
jake app:run dir=basics/simple C=A3B8061E-3F77-45B3-A697-509C46213B5F

As with iOS simulators, you can target specific Android emulators; you do so by device name.

# to get a list of device names
ti info -t android

# then build to a specific one
# make sure to use quotes if the name has spaces
jake app:run dir=basics/simple platform=android C="Google Galaxy Nexus - 4.3 - API 18 - 720x1280"

In your repo clone, you will find many test apps that correspond to Alloy Jira tickets. We use these when functionally testing Alloy changes. Because we run them so often, there's a shortcut syntax:

# for the Jira apps, the dir= part is optional
jake app:run dir=ALOY-1000

The sdk argument to ti build specifies the version of the CLI that will be used to parse the tiapp.xml file. It does not override the sdk-version value specified in the tiapp.xml.

However, for the Alloy testing apps only, that argument will specify the sdk-version. That's because those testing apps do not have an <sdk-version> tag in their tiapp.xml file (see projects/HarnessTemplate/tiapp.xml).

For the Alloy test apps, the SDK version used to build your apps is determined by either the command-line argument you supply to the jake command or the value you have set with the ti sdk select command.