Anyone who uses both Linux and an iDevice knows the struggle; Apple don’t make iTunes for Linux, and all you can really do with your phone on Linux is browse your photos over USB, and even that is frequently unreliable and slow. Thankfully, however, there exists a set of open-source tools that you can use to interact with your iDevice, called libimobiledevice. Whilst they are available on the Debian and Ubuntu repos (sudo apt install libimobiledevice6), this post aims to explain how to compile them yourself, how to acquire developer disk images, and some basic usage. I’ll give apt commands to install any required packages, which should be compatible with Debian and Ubuntu. If you’re using a non-apt-based distro, you’ll need to find these packages yourself.

Compiling

Before we can compile libimobiledevice, we must first download the source code from GitHub. Ensure you have git installed and execute:

git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice

Alternatively, you can navigate to the GitHub page and download it from there.

There are a few packages you’ll also need to install. These are:

• build-essential
• automake
• autoconf
• libtool
• pkg-config
• cython
• openssl
• libplist-dev
• libplist++-dev
• libusbmuxd-dev
• usbmuxd

On Ubuntu, you can install these with

sudo apt install build-essential automake autoconf libtool pkg-config cython openssl libplist-dev libplist++-dev libusbmuxd-dev usbmuxd

Navigate to where you have cloned libimobiledevice, and we can configure it and generate the Makefile. Simply execute ./autogen.sh, and this should be all.

If it all goes correctly, it should now be a simple matter of running make in your terminal. If this completes without error, then you have successfully compiled libimobiledevice.

Getting Developer Disk Images

libimobiledevice is now mostly fully-functional, but a few of the tools it provides are completely useless without a Developer Disk Image. These are what Xcode uses to perform certain functions, like launching apps from your computer, or remotely taking screenshots. There is a disk image for every major iOS version, and this will work across all minor versions (i.e. the image for iOS 11.4 will work for all 11.4.x versions, but not for any 11.3.x versions).

Developer Disk Images are distributed with Xcode, and can be extracted on Linux from the Xcode application file. You can download this from Apple (iCloud login required). Look for the latest download entitled “Xcode &ltversion&gt” (at the time of writing, this was “Xcode 9.4.1”), and download it. Be warned; this will be quite a large file (Xcode 9.4.1 was 4.9GB) and it will take up a lot more space as we extract it, so make sure to save it to somewhere with a lot of free space. These downloads can also be quite slow, so be patient and don’t try to download Xcode from elsewhere :)

Unless something has changed since the time of writing, you will be downloading a .xip file. This is an XAR file, or eXtensible ARchive file. The XAR format is basically just another kind of zip file that allows for digital signatures to be added to the file, so that the file contents can be verified before extraction. Your distro’s archive manager may be open and extract it automatically, but it’s unlikely.

Instead, you’re going to need to compile another program. You can download the latest version of the source files from GitHub user mackyle. Just download and extract the tarball, open a terminal window here, and run ./configure && make. The xar binary can then be found as ./src/xar. To extract your Xcode .xip, use:

src/xar -C <directory to extract to> -xf /path/to/Xcode.xip

This will take some time because of how large the archive is, but will extract two files; Content, and Metadata. We won’t be using the Metadata file, but we will need to process Content.

The Content file is a pbzx payload, and so we need yet another utility to extract it. I found one such parser here, but I was unable to get it to compile. Fortunately, I found a a pure Python reimplementation of the pbzx parser, which extracts a much simpler cpio archive. You can download it with:

wget https://gist.github.com/Lekensteyn/6e0840e77bc9bd013f57/raw/d8c757de5293b5c3a1ab644297e2cb97d65378dc/parse_pbzx.py && chmod +x parse_pbzx.py

We can now dump a directory listing of the .xip file. The pbzx parser will interpret the file, allowing cpio to decode it. We can get the directory listing to a file by running ./parse_pbzx.py /path/to/Content | cpio -t > dir_listing (this will take a long time, though, due to the sheer number of files in the archive). If you want, you can extract the entirety of the archive to the current directory with ./parse_pbzx.py /path/to/Content | cpio -i, but this, too, will take a long time to get the files you need and will waste a lot of space on your hard drive.

If you were to generate this directory listing, and you searched for DeveloperDiskImage, you’d find the path ./Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport. All the files under this path are Developer Disk Images. Thankfully, cpio has the ability to filter which files are extracted. To extract our iPhone Developer Disk Images, we use the following command:

mkdir -p "Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/" && ./parse_pbzx.py /path/to/Content | cpio -i "./Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/*"

Leave this command running for a while (you can add the -v argument if you want to make sure it’s still working) and check inside the Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport folder we’ve created. Eventually a bunch of numbered directories, each corresponding to an iOS version, will start to appear here. Inside each of these directories you’ll find two files: DeveloperDiskImage.img and DeveloperDiskImage.img.sig. These are the files we need to fully utilise all of libimobiledevice’s tools! Once you have all the versions you need, and you can see their file sizes aren’t changing, feel free to kill the command and delete all the Xcode archive files.

Using libimobiledevice

If you return, in a terminal, to wherever you compiled libimobiledevice you can begin to make use of the application. All of the tools you’ll need to use are found in the tools subdirectory of libimobiledevice, and you can either change to that directory or execute them from here (or, if you decided to install libimobiledevice, you can just run them from anywhere).

Almost all of these tools will require your device to be paired with your computer. Connect your device via USB, and, if necessary, enter your passcode to trust your computer, and use the following command:

tools/idevicepair pair

You should see a message in your terminal if pairing was successful. Now, you are able to perform many userland commands, for example backing up your phone with tools/idevicebackup2, or get information about your device with tools/ideviceinfo. All of these commands have helpful --help messages, too, so these can guide you with any commands you’re interested in.

If you attempt to use tools/idevicedebug or tools/idevicescreenshot, you’ll be informed that you need to mount your developer disk image. Now we can get some use out of them after we took the time to extract them! To mount them, use the following command:

tools/ideviceimagemounter /path/to/DeveloperDiskImage.dmg /path/to/DeveloperDiskImage.dmg.sig

Make sure to supply the right disk image and sig file for your version of iOS, else mounting will fail. Once the disk images are mounted, you can take screenshots of your phone screen that will be saved directly to your computer, and you can launch apps on your phone from your computer.

Once you’re finished with the disk image, simply reboot your device to unmount it. You can either reboot it from your phone, or from your computer with the command:

tools/idevicediagnostics restart

I thought it important to document the compiling process and the process of extracting the disk images from Xcode. Neither of these things were explained to me, but through a combination of research and intuition I was able to master libimobiledevice. Both for my own sake and for anyone else trying to do the same in the future, I hope this post will be useful.