Cocoapods are third-party libraries that help you do some of the work in your app for you saving your time. These Cocoapods are built with Ruby and is installable with the built-in Ruby on your Mac OS. Search for your required Cocoapod here.

First install on your macOS using the below command in your Mac terminal:

$ sudo gem install cocoapods

Your installed gems list may be a lot longer than shown above as I’ve already installed before.

Next, setup pods with:

$ pods setup --verbose

–verbose is optional, it’ll just show you the progress of the setup.

Once, the setup is completed, let’s install the individual cocoapods. Navigate to the folder of your Project and create the pod file. And then open it for editing with the following commands:

$ cd myapp

$ pod init

$ open -a Xcode podfile

Make changes to your podfile similar to shown above after uncommenting/removing a few lines. The first line tells the minimum supported iOS platform. The general rule of the thumb is to support the last 2 iOS releases. The target is the name of your project.

use_frameworks is required for Swift Projects. The provide the list of pods inside the do block which are required for your app. Make sure the name is correct as selected from the Cocoapods.org site. Please do check if the pods you’re using is well maintained and when was the last time it was updated. Should not be like last updated 4-5 years ago is not a good sign.

Once your changes are done, save the file and run the below command while within the app folder:

$ pod install

From now on, you would want to open your project in Xcode using .xcworkspace in your Project folder instead of .xcodeproj.

To use the pod in your project, just import the pod using the import statement in your class and you can use it as per the documentation e.g.

import VENTokenField
import SVProgressHUD

To uninstall and clean your Project completely from CocoaPods, run the following commands:

$ sudo gem install cocoapods-deintegrate cocoapods-clean
$ pod deintegrate && pod clean
$ rm Podfile