cocoapods-links

A CocoaPods plugin to manage local development pods

gem install cocoapods-links

Let's face it, pod development with local dependencies can be a pain. Let's say you have a project MyApp a few pods declared in your Podfile:

pod 'Foo', '~> 1.0.0'
pod 'Bar', :git => 'https://github.com/MyCompany/Bar.git', :tag => "1.0.1"

Perhaps you need to make some modifications to Bar to implement a new feature in MyApp. So you modify your Podfile:

pod 'Bar', :path => "/path/to/bar/checkout"

This development flow requires you to make a temporary change to your Podfile that is managed by source control. Wouldn't it be great if CocoaPods offered a means to manage development pods without having to alter files under source control?

Enter cocoapods-links.

With cocoapods-links, developers can easily test their pods using the provided link functionality. Linking is a two-step process:

Using pod link in a project folder will register a global link. Then, in another pod, pod link <name> will create a link to the registered pod as a development pod.

This allows developers to easily test a pod because changes will be reflected immediately. When the link is no longer necessary, simply remove it with pod unlink <name>.

NOTE: Although the Podfile and Podfile.lock will not be updated using links, the Pods xcodeproj will be updated. If you check in the contents of your Pods directory then you must make sure to unlink your development pods prior to committing any changes.

To register a pod for local development linking:

pod link

To unregister a pod:

pod unlink

To link a pod for use in another pod project:

pod link <name>

To unlink a pod from a pod project:

pod unlink <name>

To list all registered pods

pod list links

To list all linked pods in a pod project:

pod list links --linked

cocoapods-links is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE.