Five Killer Features of CocoaPods for iOS Development are In Transit

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Let’s explore all the shiny features of CocoaPods 1.7.0.

One of the reason, I hate CocoaPods a lot because it builds all the dependent framework from scratch for the clean build. This takes a lot of time and builds time increases a lot especially if you are not doing incremental builds. On the cloud CI services, they usually create fresh VM for each build and CocoaPods build all the frameworks from scratch unless you cached it.

Now, every time you run pod install only changed frameworks will be built. On CI, we still need to cache the dependencies but it’s a great improvement and will save loads of developer time.

Benefits: Faster builds and Developer productivity.

Swift is an evolving programming language. The new version of the Swift lands every now and then and library author has to keep their projects up to date with latest Swift version. You might have often seen this error

This error usually causes when the dependency module is not up to date with the latest Swift. Now you don’t have to worry about it, as a library author, you can specify the multiple Swift versions in the Podspec file.

Now that, author of the library and user of the libraries doesn’t need to rush to support the latest Swift versions. Another feature is Cocoapods now generate multiple pod projects. We can enable that feature from Podfile

Benefits: Multiple Swift version support makes the life of library developers painless.

CocoaPods has already announced the support for the test specs but now it’s been expanded to the app specs. App specs will be a great way to demonstrate to users how the library works using the example app. Authors can define the App specs in the Podspec file as

The user of this library can optionally use the App Specs by defining the target library wit App specs as follows:

BenefitL App specs can make your library much lightweight.

CocoaPods will give you an option to pass the launch arguments and launch environments to the test specs. The scheme will automatically take this variable for run action in the scheme. In the Podspec, the author can define it as

Benefit: This feature can be used for running tests with different configurations.

Apple announced the support for the .xcfilelist file when the input and output paths in the Run Script phase increases. We can create a separate file and add it there. CocoaPods will automatically detect if the file creation is needed or not and generate the Run Script phase accordingly.

Benefit: This can be used for easy duplication the build configuration

CocoaPods has come back very strong with these amazing features. This new features will dramatically reduce the build time and library authors will have lots of freedom while creating new libraries or SDKs. Hope you will try these features as soon as a stable release is published! Well Done CocoaPods team!

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