AssetKit

A clean-room Swift implementation of Apple's actool that compiles .xcassets catalogs into the Assets.car file format.

Targets CoreUI 970 (Xcode 26 / iOS 16+). See docs/coreui-970-format.md for the format reference.

Usage

.package(url: "https://github.com/xtool-org/AssetKit", .upToNextMinor(from: "1.0.0")),

import AssetKit

// `svgRasterizer` defaults to `RsvgConvertRasterizer()`, which shells out
// to `rsvg-convert` (install with `apt install librsvg2-tools`,
// `dnf install librsvg2-tools`, or `brew install librsvg`). Replace it
// with your own `SVGRasterizer` if you'd rather not depend on a system
// binary.
let compiler = XCAssetCompiler(deploymentTarget: "16.0")
let result = try await compiler.compile(catalog: catalogURL)

try result.carData.write(to: outputURL.appendingPathComponent("Assets.car"))

if let bundle = result.appIconBundle {
    // Merge bundle.infoPlistAdditions into the app's Info.plist
    // Write each bundle.looseFiles entry into the bundle root for SpringBoard's
    // icon-render fallback path
}

What it supports

• .imageset
  • PNG sources (1x/2x/3x scales, sRGB and display-P3, dark/light appearances)
  • SVG sources, each emitted as one preserved vector rendition (XML kept verbatim, LZFSE-compressed inside a DWAR envelope) plus three rasterised bitmap fallbacks at 1x/2x/3x (because UIImage(named:) reads the rasterised fallbacks; the vector rendition is what other CoreUI consumers and future iOS versions may prefer). Rasterisation is delegated to an injectable SVGRasterizer; the default shells out to rsvg-convert.
  • JPG sources stored as preserved raw renditions (JPEG bytes passed through; original compression preserved)
• .colorset (sRGB and display-P3, hex or float components, dark/light appearances)
• .appiconset (per-idiom and per-size, with the loose-PNG fallback that SpringBoard expects alongside Assets.car). PNG sources only; SVG/JPG are rejected because SpringBoard's icon-render pipeline requires PNG.

What it deliberately doesn't support

• .pdf vector sources (the CoreUI 970 DWAR envelope path is SVG-flavoured; adding PDF would need a separate pixelFormat)
• Multi-rendition fanout — actool emits multiple compression variants per asset (deepmap-lzfse, deepmap2, palette-img); this writer emits one rendition per (idiom, scale, appearance) tuple per source format. Sufficient for iOS 16+.
• Data sets, sticker sets, AR reference objects
• macOS / tvOS / watchOS asset variants beyond what the structural attribute IDs encode

These can be added; the format mechanisms in Sources/AssetKit/CAR/ are general enough.

Compression

Bitmap renditions are compressed with LZFSE on every platform via a vendored copy of Apple's reference encoder (Sources/CLZFSE/, BSD 3-Clause). CAR output is byte-deterministic across Linux and macOS.

Tests

swift test

The test suite includes a macOS-only gate (AssetutilParseTests) that compiles a fixture catalog and verifies Apple's own xcrun assetutil --info parses the bytes and reports the expected rendition fields. This is the durable verification for CoreUI format compatibility and gates merges via CI.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.