Methods marked with the star (*) character do not require the udid property to be set on the Simctl instance upon their invocation. All other methods will throw an error if the udid property is unset while they are being invoked.

All public methods are supplied with docstrings that describe their arguments and returned values.

The Simctl class constructor supports the following options:

xcrun (Object): The xcrun properties. Currently only one property is supported, which is path and it by default contains null, which enforces the instance to automatically detect the full path to xcrun tool and to throw an exception if it cannot be detected. If the path is set upon instance creation then it is going to be used by exec and no autodetection will happen.
execTimeout (number[600000]): The maximum number of milliseconds to wait for a single synchronous xcrun command.
logErrors (boolean[true]): Whether to write xcrun error messages into the debug log before throwing them as errors.
udid (string[null]): The unique identifier of the current device, which is going to be implicitly passed to all methods, which require it (see above). It can either be set upon instance creation if it is already known or later when/if needed via the corresponding setter.
devicesSetPath (string[null]): Full path to the set of devices that you want to manage. By default this path usually equals to ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices. This option has a getter and a setter which allows to switch between multiple device sets during the Simctl instance life cycle.

Advanced Usage

Any simctl subcommand could be called via exec method, which accepts the subcommand itself as the first argument and the set of options, which may contain additional command args, environment variables, encoding, etc. For example:

import Simctl from 'node-simctl';

const simctl = new Simctl();
const name = 'My Device Name';
simctl.udid = await simctl.createDevice(name, 'iPhone X', '13.3');
await simctl.bootDevice();
await simctl.startBootMonitor({timeout: 120000});
await simctl.exec('pbsync');
console.log(`Pasteboard content: ${await simctl.getPasteboard()}`);
const {stdout} = await simctl.exec('status_bar', {
  args: [simctl.udid, 'list']
});
console.log(output);
simctl.udid = void(await simctl.deleteDevice());

See specs for examples of usage.

Running Multiple Simulator SDKs On a Single Computer

It is possible to run multiple simulators using different Xcode SDKs on a single machine. Simply set a proper value to DEVELOPER_DIR environment variable for each process.

Read this MacOps article for more details.