Developing with CocoaPods

Managing dependencies can be a challenge. Core libraries and shared resources like login, styling
classes, and API/credential persistence seems daunting. Managing code signing and embedded binaries,
are necessary but painful parts of building a working app. Furthermore, for an agile and growing app one
must have a modular codebase, one that allows testing and experimenting on prototypes without being
cumbersome.

Answer: CocoaPods

Whether it’s a single-function app or some kind of ecosystem, an agile, modular and efficient
architecture is needed, and doing everything manually is simply no longer feasible. Fortunately,
CocoaPods offers precisely the kind of smart and hands-off dependency management that will give its
users more time building code, instead of wasting time resolving dependency issues. To date, CocoaPods
is one of the easiest and most popular ways to integrate libraries and dependencies.

There is now less worry about breaking the entire build due to a change in a core library. The knowledge
that CocoPods can simply “glue” everything together gives one the freedom to deploy each component
or sub-app for testing. In fact, CocaPods has an extensive test suite. This makes for higher quality
feedback, and rapid prototyping.

CocoaPods is well documented and its libraries are all built in and well-defined, and this allows ease of
use with its open libraries. It takes care of the entire build process and it even automatically updates to
newer versions, just for our ease of mind. Though it has a library with thousands of resources, it also
offers a private one.

Implementation

First, you will need Ruby to install CocoaPods. It is recommended to use default Ruby, and may require
sudo when installing gems.

Then, it is necessary to list, install and import all of the the dependencies to your project will be using.
This is done using the Podfile. CocoaPods makes it very simple to create a pod to house all your
dependencies, and you can create one with just a few lines of code.

CocoaPods is developing in GitHub, where a thriving and supportive open source community can make
adapting to CocoaPods even easier for new users.