Greenlight: Fast App Store Pre‑Submission Compliance Scanner

Building an iOS app is only half the battle. Apple’s Review Guidelines are notoriously strict, and a single oversight can cost days, weeks, or even months of development time. Greenlight eliminates that risk by scanning your project before you ever upload to App Store Connect.

What is Greenlight?

An open‑source, CLI‑based tool that evaluates Swift, Objective‑C, React Native, and Expo code for 30+ rejection‑risk patterns. It also checks metadata, privacy manifests, and even IPA binaries for missing information, bad URLs, or unsafe content. The scanner is 100 % offline and generates human‑readable or JSON output for CI integrations.

Why You Need Greenlight

• Avoid Rejections: Spot critical issues—private API usage, hard‑coded secrets, missing ATT—before Apple does.
• Speed Deployment: Scan in under a second on a local machine or CI runner.
• CI‑Ready: Output can be parsed by GitHub Actions, Bitrise, or any CI system.
• Self‑Healing: Hook into Claude or Codex skills for automatic remediation.

Installation & Quick Start

Once installed, run a full pre‑flight scan:

# Scan current directory and print results to terminal
greenlight preflight .

# Include an IPA for binary inspection
greenlight preflight . --ipa build.ipa

# Export JSON for parsing in CI pipelines
greenlight preflight . --format json --output report.json

The preflight command executes all scanners in parallel: metadata, codescan, privacy, and optional ipa checks.

Deep Dive: What Each Scanner Checks

CI / CD Integration

Greenlight outputs JSON, making it perfect for automated pipelines. Here’s a minimal GitHub Actions snippet that fails the build on any critical issue:

- name: App Store compliance
  run: |
    greenlight preflight .
    greenlight preflight . --format json --output report.json
    if jq -e '.summary.critical > 0' report.json > /dev/null; then
      echo "CRITICAL issues found – fix before submission"
      exit 1
    fi

More advanced uses include JUnit output for test reporting, or leveraging the scan command to query your App Store Connect metadata directly.

Automated Fixing with Claude & Codex

Claude Code Skill

# Copy skill file
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp /path/to/greenlight/SKILL.md .claude/skills/greenlight.md

Now, ask Claude:

Run greenlight preflight and fix everything until it passes

Claude will repeatedly scan and patch until the result is GREENLIT.

Codex Skill

mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills/app-store-preflight-compliance
cp -R codex-skill/* ~/.codex/skills/app-store-preflight-compliance/

Then, in your Codex prompt:

Use $app-store-preflight-compliance to run Greenlight preflight and fix all findings until GREENLIT.

Both skills turn Greenlight into a self‑healing compliance runner.

When to Use Greenlight

Getting Help & Contributing

Greenlight is released under an MIT license. Contributions are welcome—check out the repo for open issues or submit a pull request. Documentation is in the README.md, and a minimal SKILL.md and codex-skill package are included for AI integration.

For more information, visit the GitHub repo:

• Repository: https://github.com/RevylAI/greenlight
• Documentation: https://github.com/RevylAI/greenlight/blob/main/README.md

Conclusion

Pre‑submission compliance is a silent killer of app releases. Greenlight removes that unseen risk by giving you instant, actionable feedback on code, metadata, privacy, and binaries—everything you need to meet Apple’s strict guidelines before you build your IPA.

With a single command, you can:

1. Scan a local project or an IPA file.
2. Run in CI pipelines to enforce compliance.
3. Integrate with AI tools to automatically fix critical issues.
4. Keep your codebase healthy, your privacy manifest up‑to‑date, and your app ready for a smooth App Store review.

Start today—install Greenlight, run a preflight scan, and avoid those dreaded rejections.