Setup Carthage and CocoaPods
CocoaPods and Carthage are two of the most prominent package-management and dependency management software. They are very popular in Swift and Objective-C communities. I have been using Carthage heavily with my last client for the past 2 years and sort of “touch-and-go” with the Cocoapods. It’s time to dissect and look at them closely.
Getting to Know Them
The first step - getting to know them. Here are the best places to get information about them.
Carthage
-
This is the best place to start learning about Carthage.
CocoaPods
-
CocoaPods also has Github page. This was the how they started and this was how I found and trust them.
-
This is a hint of who is winning. CocoaPods is getting ahead and now has their own website.
Github Pages is a good starting point. That was how I found them and many of the trust-able pieces of software. I feel more comfortable with them when they bare all their source codes open for inspection. Plus, there are many sets of eyes helping with the inspection - thus the Check & Bound Due Process at work.
Installation
All these happened on must trusty MacBook with the following spec:
- Macbook 2016 with 8GM RAM
- Mac OS Mojave 10.14.4
Installing & Fixing Carthage
Most of my Carthage work is on my mac at work. I haven’t used it on my personal MacBook in a while. When I attempted to use it again, it complained that I had a version that was too old. So, now was a good time to upgraded it.
$ carthage version
Please update to the latest Carthage version: 0.33.0. You currently are on 0.28.0
0.28.0
$ brew upgrade carthage
Output:
Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 2 taps (homebrew/core and homebrew/cask).
==> New Formulae
allureofthestars cfn-lint cubelib itk leela-zero scws
boringtun cpp-gsl cypher-shell ktlint otf2
==> Updated Formulae
ammonite-repl erlang gtranslator meson restic
ansifilter erlang@20 hebcal mingw-w64 rke
apache-geode ethereum hugo minio ruby-build
.
.
.
Error: carthage not installed
Doh! Nothing is going to be easy, ever! Now, I remembered, the last time I installed Carthage was with using the .pkg file that I downloaded. This way was quick but wasn’t cool. The better way is:
$ brew install carthage
Toward the end of installation, I got this error!
...
Error: The `brew link` step did not complete successfully
The formula built, but is not symlinked into /usr/local
Could not symlink bin/carthage
Target /usr/local/bin/carthage
already exists. You may want to remove it:
rm '/usr/local/bin/carthage'
To force the link and overwrite all conflicting files:
brew link --overwrite carthage
To list all files that would be deleted:
brew link --overwrite --dry-run carthage
Possible conflicting files are:
/usr/local/bin/carthage
==> Caveats
Ok, let’s fix this. I deleted /usr/local/bin/carthage and re-link carthage again.
$ brew link carthage
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/carthage/0.33.0... 4 symlinks created
$ carthage version
0.33.0
Yeh!
Phew! Next is the pods.
Installing Cocoapods
First, Check my Pods.
$ pod
-bash: pod: command not found
Again, I could quickly install a package for Mac - but this wasn’t cool. A better way, is via a command-line. Cocoapods uses RubyGem gem, a package management in Ruby. Let’s check it.
$ gem --version
2.5.2.3
That’s cool. Let’s start the installation.
$ gem install cocoapods
Fetching: cocoapods-1.6.1.gem (100%)
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.3.0 directory.
Oh! Cocoapods installation actually modifies files outside the log-in user’s home directory. You will need root access to install it.
$ sudo gem install cocoapods
Password:
Fetching: ruby-macho-1.4.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed ruby-macho-1.4.0
Fetching: nap-1.1.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed nap-1.1.0
Fetching: gh_inspector-1.1.3.gem (100%)
Successfully installed gh_inspector-1.1.3
...
Done installing documentation for ruby-macho, nap, gh_inspector, fourflusher, escape, colored2, concurrent-ruby, i18n, thread_safe, tzinfo, activesupport, atomos, CFPropertyList, claide, nanaimo, xcodeproj, molinillo, cocoapods-try, netrc, cocoapods-trunk, cocoapods-stats, cocoapods-search, cocoapods-plugins, cocoapods-downloader, cocoapods-deintegrate, fuzzy_match, cocoapods-core, cocoapods after 44 seconds
28 gems installed
That was smooth! Depends on your internet speed, It took mine about 3-4 minutes. Checking the installation.
$ pod --version
1.6.1
Yes! Yes! Now we are ready to play with them.