How to setup cocoapods for your project and how to use? Also learn about semantic versioning.

1. Milan Panchal
iOS Developer
B L O G : h t t p : / / w w w . j e e n a l i n f o t e c h . c o m /
iOS - Cocoa Pods
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Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

2. Agenda
 What is CocoaPods?
 Why use CocoaPods?
 Installing CocoaPods
 Using CocoaPods in a project
 CocoaPods Versioning
 CocoaPods and source control
 What is Podfile.lock?
 Other
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Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

3. What is CocoaPods?
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 CocoaPods is a dependency management tool for
iOS (Objective-C/Swift) and OS X development.
Eg. Maven for Java Projects.
 It is built with Ruby so we can install through
default Ruby available on OS X.
 It has thousands of libraries and can help you scale
your projects elegantly.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

4. Why we use CocoaPods?
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 You begin working on a project and everything is going
great. As the project progresses, you find it necessary
to use third party libraries to help the project move
along faster.
 You do this by searching for appropriate libraries and
copying the source code into your project.
 When a library is updated, you manually update it in
your project. At times, a library might break your
build, forcing you to revert back to a compatible
version.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

5. Why we use CocoaPods? (Continue.)
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 You have to search for it and copy it into your
project. Add more libraries and you start noticing the
time drain that maintaining your project
dependencies is.
 You are also bound to encounter situations where a
library you want to use depends on another library
and you will have to get them both.
 If you use multiple libraries sharing a dependency,
but all specify a different version of the dependency,
you’ll have to figure out what the best version of the
library is that will satisfy all dependencies.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

6. Why we use CocoaPods? (Continue.)
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 As your project scales, you’ll be spending a lot of time
managing its dependencies, time that could be better
used writing code.
 CocoaPods make managing dependencies in your code
easier. Adding and removing dependencies is just a
matter of defining them in a file and running a command
to install them.
 CocoaPods reads the file, determines the dependencies
that the listed libraries have and if there are any shared
dependencies, it tries to determine the version that will
satisfy all of them. It uses Semantic Versioning to try to
resolve dependency versions.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

7. Installing CocoaPods
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 CocoaPods is distributed as a Ruby gem and so will
require Ruby and RubyGems (the Ruby package
manager) to be installed on your system.
 To check whether Ruby is installed, run the ruby -v
command in the Terminal.
 Before installing CocoaPods, first update your
RubyGems.
$ [sudo] gem update --system
 To install CocoaPods, run the following command.
$ [sudo] gem install cocoapods
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

8. Installing CocoaPods (Continue)
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 Next run the following to setup CocoaPods on you
system.
$ pod setup [--verbose]
 This will create a ~/.cocoapods/ directory which will
contain all the available public pod specifications
cloned from the CocoaPods Master Specs Repo.
 This process will likely take a few minutes as it clones
the CocoaPods Master Specs repository into
~/.cocoapods/ on your computer.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

9. Installing CocoaPods (Continue)
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 The verbose option logs progress as the process
runs, allowing you to watch the process instead of
seeing a seemingly “frozen” screen.
 Now we are all set up and ready to use CocoaPods
in our project. 
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

10. Using CocoaPods (Continue)
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 To create the Podfile, using Terminal, navigate to the
root of the app you created.
$ cd /Path/to/Project/TestApp
 Run the following command, which will create a
Podfile at the specified file path.
$ pod init
 Type this command to open the Podfile using Xcode
for editing:
$ open -a Xcode Podfile
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11. Using CocoaPods (Continue)
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The default Podfile looks like this:
# Uncomment this line to define a global platform for your project
# platform :ios, "8.0”
target "TestApp" do
pod 'iOS-Category'
pod 'iOS-Category', '~> 1.0.4’
end
target "TestAppTests" do
end
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

12. Using CocoaPods (Continue)
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 The platform can be either ios or osx.
 Add a CocoaPod by specifying pod
'$PODNAME' on a single line
 After editing the Podfile, save it and run
the following command.
$ pod install
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13. Using CocoaPods (Continue)
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Inhibits all the warnings from the CocoaPods libraries.
Add the following to the top of Podfile to tell CocoaPods
to silence all warnings from pod dependencies:
$ inhibit_all_warnings!
If you would like to inhibit warnings per Pod you can
use the following syntax:
$ pod 'iOS-Category', :inhibit_warnings => true
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

14. Using CocoaPods (Continue)
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 use_frameworks!
platform :ios, "8.0"
use_frameworks!
 This tells CocoaPods that your project is targeting
iOS 8.0 and will be using frameworks instead of
static libraries.
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15. Using CocoaPods (Continue)
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 generate_bridge_support!
 Specifies that a BridgeSupport metadata document
should be generated from the headers of all
installed Pods.
 set_arc_compatibility_flag!
 Specifies that the -fobjc-arc flag should be added to
the OTHER_LD_FLAGS.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

16. CocoaPods Versioning
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 CocoaPods follows the Semantic Versioning policy.
You can read more about major, minor and patch
versions at the given link.
 When the version number is not specified, the latest
version of the pod will be fetched.
 You can specify an exact version by including a specific
version number.
 For instance, pod 'iOS-Category', '1.0.4’
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

17. CocoaPods Versioning (Continue)
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 Besides no version, or a specific one, it is also
possible to use operators:
• > 0.1 Any version higher than 0.1.
• >= 0.1 Version 0.1 and any higher version.
• < 0.1 Any version lower than 0.1.
• <= 0.1 Version 0.1 and any lower version.
• ~> 0.1.2 Version 0.1.2 and the versions up to 0.2, not
including 0.2. This operator works based on the last
component that you specify in your version requirement.
The example is equal to >= 0.1.2 combined with < 0.2.0
and will always match the latest known version matching
your requirements.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

18. Pods and Source Control
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 There are various arguments on what CocoaPods
files should go under version control. This is
simply a matter of preference.
 There is a list of pros and cons of adding the Pods
folder in your .gitignore file.
 You should however keep the Podfile.lock under
version control. This is the file that keeps track of
what version of a Pod is installed.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

19. Pods and Source Control (Continue)
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Benefits of ignoring the Pods directory
 The source control repo will be smaller and take up less space.
 As long as the sources (e.g. GitHub) for all Pods are available,
CocoaPods is generally able to recreate the same installation.
(Technically there is no guarantee that running pod install will
fetch and recreate identical artifacts when not using a commit
SHA in the Podfile. This is especially true when using zip files in
the Podfile.)
 There won't be any conflicts to deal with when performing source
control operations, such as merging branches with different Pod
versions.
 Whether or not you check in the Pods directory, the Podfile and
Podfile.lock should always be kept under version control.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

20. Pods and Source Control (Continue)
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Benefits of checking in the Pods directory
• After cloning the repo, the project can immediately build
and run, even without having CocoaPods installed on the
machine.
• There is no need to run pod install, and no Internet
connection is necessary.
• The Pod artifacts (code/libraries) are always available,
even if the source of a Pod (e.g. GitHub) were to go down.
• The Pod artifacts are guaranteed to be identical to those in
the original installation after cloning the repo.x
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

21. What is Podfile.lock?
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 This file is generated after the first run of pod install,
and tracks the version of each Pod that was installed.
 For example, imagine the following dependency
specified in the Podfile:
pod 'iOS-Category'
 Running pod install will install the current version of
iOS-Category, causing a Podfile.lock to be generated
that indicates the exact version installed (e.g. iOS-
Category 1.0.5).
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

22. What is Podfile.lock? (Continue)
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 Thanks to the Podfile.lock, running pod install on this
hypothetical project at a later point in time on a
different machine will still install iOS-Category 1.0.5
even if a newer version is available. CocoaPods will
honour the Pod version in Podfile.lock unless the
dependency is updated in the Podfile or pod update is
called (which will cause a new Podfile.lock to be
generated). In this way CocoaPods avoids headaches
caused by unexpected changes to dependencies.
 This file should always be kept under version control.
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

23. Other
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Using the files from a local path or repo (GIT/SVN)
 From Local Machine:
pod 'ExamplePod', :path => '~/Documents/ExamplePod'
 From a git repository:
 To use the master branch of the repository:
pod 'ExamplePod', :git => 'https://github.com/eguser/ExamplePod.git'
 To use a different branch of the repository:
pod 'ExamplePod', :git => 'https://github.com/eguser/ExamplePod.git', :branch => 'dev'
 To use a tag of the repository:
pod 'AFNetworking', :git => 'https://github.com/gowalla/AFNetworking.git', :tag => '0.7.0'
 Or specify a commit:
pod 'AFNetworking', :git => 'https://github.com/gowalla/AFNetworking.git', :commit =>
'082f8319af’
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24. Other (Continue)
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 Trying Out Pods
 CocoaPods has a feature that enables you to
download and try out a library before you use it in
your project. It downloads the demo project of a
Pod and opens it in Xcode.
 Use the pod try [LIB_NAME] command to try out
a Pod.
pod try iOS-Category
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25. Other (Continue)
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Installing The Same Pod In Multiple Targets
The Ugly But Works Solution
# Podfile
platform :ios, ‘8.0’
use_frameworks!
# My other pods
target 'MyTests' do
pod 'Quick', '0.5.0'
pod 'Nimble', '2.0.0-rc.1'
end
target 'MyUITests' do
pod 'Quick', '0.5.0'
pod 'Nimble', '2.0.0-rc.1'
end
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26. Other (Continue)
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Installing The Same Pod In Multiple Targets
The Elegant Solution
platform :ios, ‘8.0’
use_frameworks!
# My other pods
def testing_pods
pod 'Quick', '0.5.0’
pod 'Nimble', '2.0.0-rc.1’
end
target 'MyTests' do
testing_pods
end
target 'MyUITests' do
testing_pods
end
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

27. Other (Continue)
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 Semantic Versioning:
• A normal version number MUST take the form
X.Y.Z where X, Y, and Z are non-negative integers,
and MUST NOT contain leading zeroes. X is the
major version, Y is the minor version, and Z is the
patch version. Each element MUST increase
numerically. For instance: 1.9.0 -> 1.10.0 -> 1.11.0
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal

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Thank You
Cocoa Pods By Milan Panchal