---
title: Liftoff Spinoff
teaser: We want to see Liftoff flourish, so we're setting it free.
tags: ios,open source
author: Gordon Fontenot
published_on: 2017-04-24
---

Over 4 years ago, [I wrote a blog post][liftoff-announce] announcing
[Liftoff], our tool for customizing Xcode projects with opinionated settings.
About a year after that, [I wrote another post][liftoff-1-0] announcing the
1.0 version of Liftoff, which included project generation and custom
templates.

[liftoff-announce]: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/opinionated-settings-for-app-development-in-xcode
[Liftoff]: https://github.com/liftoffcli/liftoff
[liftoff-1-0]: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/liftoff-10

Today, I'm writing my third (and maybe final?) post about Liftoff.

When we started working on Liftoff, we wanted a way to generate projects from
the command line quickly and repeatably. We wanted to be able to cut out the
time we were wasting on project setup so that we could get to the part that
really mattered, building great products for our clients. We think Liftoff
succeeded at that.

Unfortunately, where Liftoff succeeded, we failed. I got burned out on
maintaining it after a while and there wasn't a ton of interest internally
in keeping it going. We mostly kept using it for client projects, but
occasionally we opted to go back to the Dark Ages and created projects
manually. Over time, Liftoff has gone stale and gotten out of date. We (I,
especially) have done a poor job of acting as the maintainer for the project
and Liftoff has suffered for it.

So today, I'm trying to fix that by helping move control away from thoughtbot,
and towards the community. There are still a number of active users of Liftoff
and I'd like to give them a chance to be more involved than they have been up
till now.

The Liftoff repo is now hosted under its own org, [liftoffcli]. I'm the owner
of this org and will be adding people as contributors as they make
contributions to the project.

[liftoffcli]: https://github.com/liftoffcli

I've also moved the homebrew formula to a new tap,
[liftoffcli/homebrew-formulae]. Users of the old thoughtbot controlled tap
will want to migrate to this new one, as the old one won't be updated further.

[liftoffcli/homebrew-formulae]: https://github.com/liftoffcli/homebrew-formulae

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with Liftoff moving forward. It's
been a fun project to work on and I'm still optimistic about it's future,
especially now that I'm able to set it on this new path.