Using CocoaPods with Swift

First of all I would say that after fighting to install libraries and frameworks in xcode, the discovery of cocoapods was a huge relief. CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. Through a few command line, you can install cocoapods in your project and install libraries with just one line of code in a podfile. The library will then be managed by cocoapod, which will take care of updating it if necessary. Here is the ressources I have been using to set it up properly:

• Simple and efficient: How to Use CocoaPods with Swift
• A bit more complex but with more in-depth explanations : Swift, Frameworks and Cocoapods

All this can be resumed in a few simple steps:

1. get cocoapods through:

   sudo gem install cocoapods

2. run pod setup:

   pod setup --verbose

3. navigate to your project directory and run pod init:

   pod init

4. in your project directory create a new podfile, either manually or through command line:

   open -a Xcode Podfile

5. Replace the commented code in the podfile with the following lines, and add the framework you want to install (TSMessage here):

   platform :ios, "8.0"
   use_frameworks!

   pod 'TSMessage', '1.2.3' //if you don't specify a version, cocoapod will automatically keep the framework updated to the last version

6. run pod install to install the dependencies of this framework (and every time you wish to import a new framework, just add the line in the podfile and run pod install again):

   pod install

7. close xcode and open the newly created yourproject.xcworkspace. Remember that from now on, you MUST always work in .xcworkspace
8. create a bridging header in which to put a link to the framework header
9. If you run into an error message from xcode saying “unresolved identifiers” while trying to use a class from the framework you just imported don’t worry, I got the same issue and after (a lot of) googling, I found out this nice article which explain that you should just add:

   import framework_name //framework_name being the name of your framework

   at the top of your class, and you’re good to go!