Cocoapods Requirement Installation and Usage with Swift

Requirement and Why to use it:

While developing projects we need third Party libraries, whenever we have to add new library we copy its code to our Project, while upgrading our Project to meet latest xCode requirements sometimes we need latest version of those libararies which we have added to our projects and in one project we might be using several third party libraries which we have to update, to manage all thsese headaches  developers use dependency managers like CocoaPods. 

Life without dependency manager:

1) Upgrading a library to a latest version can be difficult, especially if various libraries must be updated together because one can depend on another.

2) Including a library in your project makes it tempting to make local changes to the code, making it harder to update to a newer version later.

3) Determining the current version if the librabry used in your project can be a tough job especially if you are now tracking your changes.

4) Finding new libraries can be difficult without a central location to see all the available libraries.

Installation:

Open Terminal and enter the following command:

sudo gem install cocoapods

Enter your password when requested. You must use sudo to install CocoaPods, but you won’t need to use sudo after it’s installed.

Lastly, enter this command in Terminal to complete the setup:

pod setup --verbose

This process will likely take a few minutes as it clones the CocoaPods Master Specs repository into ~/.cocoapods/ on your computer.

The verbose option logs progress as the process runs, allowing you to watch the process instead of seeing a seemingly “frozen” screen.

Usage:

You first need to close Xcode.

Open Terminal and navigate to the directory that contains your IceCreamShop project by using the cd command:

cd ~/Path/To/Folder/Containing/Project

Next, enter this command:

pod init

This creates a Podfile for your project.

Type this command to open the Podfile using Xcode for editing:

open -a Xcode Podfile

The default Podfile looks like this:

# Uncomment this line to define a global platform for your project

# platform :ios, ‘8.0’

target ‘Project’ do

end

target ‘ProjectTests' do

end

Replace the two commented lines with the following:

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.

Now add dependency using CocoaPods. Save and Close the Podfile

You now need to tell CocoaPods to install the dependencies for your project. Enter the following command in Terminal:

pod install

This is all you need to do!