CocoaPods

CocoaPods is an application level dependency manager for Objective-C, Swift and any other languages that run on the Objective-C runtime, such as RubyMotion,^[2] that provides a standard format for managing external libraries. It was developed by Eloy Durán and Fabio Pelosin, who continue to manage the project with the help and contributions of many others.^[3] They began development in August 2011^[4] and made the first public release^[5] on September 1, 2011. CocoaPods is strongly inspired by a combination of the Ruby projects RubyGems and Bundler. It claims to have over 103 thousand libraries and to be used in over 3 million apps.^[6]

CocoaPods focuses on source-based distribution of third party code and automatic integration into Xcode projects.

CocoaPods runs from the command line and is also integrated in JetBrains' AppCode integrated development environment.^[7] It installs dependencies (e.g. libraries) for an application by specification of dependencies rather than by manually copying source files.^[8] Besides installing from many different sources, a “master” spec repository—containing metadata for many open-source libraries—is maintained as a Git repository and hosted on GitHub.^[9] CocoaPods dependency resolution system is powered by Molinillo which is also used by other large projects such as Bundler, RubyGems, and Berkshelf.