CocoaPods + Plugins
CocoaPods is a community project run by very few maintainers with a massive surface area to maintain. It's safe to say that CocoaPods could never support every feature that Xcode supports, and even then the team has to say "no" to a lot of potentially useful features.
Rather than let that be the end of the discussion, back in 2013 CocoaPods added support for CocoaPods Plugins. The plugin architecture allowed others to extend CocoaPods to support features that don't fit the main goal of dependency management and eco-system growth.
What can CocoaPods Plugins do?
A CocoaPods Plugin can:
- Hook into the install process, both before and after
- Add new commands to
pod - Do whatever they want, because Ruby is a very dynamic language
This means the scope of a plugin is generally related to adding features to your build process, but can really do anything
you want. For example cocoapods-roulette generates a new iOS app
with three random Pods. We keep a relatively curated list of all plugins, you can see them at the end of this article.
How do I install a plugin
You will want to use a Gemfile, if you've never used a Gemfile before or want a refresher - check out our guide
"Using a Gemfile". All CocoaPods Plugins are Gems, and they are installed by first adding
them to the Gemfile, then you need to mention that they exist inside your Podfile.
For example, to use cocoapods-repo-update - you need to
amend your Gemfile:
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'cocoapods'
+ gem 'cocoapods-repo-update'
gem 'fastlane'
Then add a reference to it in your Podfile:
platform :ios, '9.0'
+ plugin 'cocoapods-repo-update'
use_frameworks!
# OWS Pods
pod 'SignalCoreKit', git: 'https://github.com/signalapp/SignalCoreKit.git', testspecs: ["Tests"]
Running bundle exec pod install will then have the cocoapods-repo-update plugin executed also.
What Plugins Exist?
There's quite a few! If you have some more to add, send us a PR to this JSON file