Open Source Swift Dependency Managers

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It has over 82 thousand libraries and is used in over 3 million apps. CocoaPods can help you scale your projects elegantly. CocoaPods is built with Ruby and is installable with the default Ruby available on macOS. We recommend you use the default ruby. Using the default Ruby install can require you to use sudo when installing gems. Further installation instructions are in the guides. CocoaPods manages library dependencies for your Xcode projects. The dependencies for your projects are specified in a single text file called a Podfile. CocoaPods will resolve dependencies between libraries, fetch the resulting source code, then link it together in an Xcode workspace to build your project. Ultimately the goal is to improve discoverability of, and engagement in, third party open-source libraries by creating a more centralised ecosystem.

Carthage is intended to be the simplest way to add frameworks to your Cocoa application. Carthage builds your dependencies and provides you with binary frameworks, but you retain full control over your project structure and setup. Carthage does not automatically modify your project files or your build settings. Get Carthage by running brew install carthage or choose another installation method. Create a Cartfile in the same directory where your .xcodeproj or .xcworkspace is. List the desired dependencies in the Cartfile. Once you have Carthage installed, you can begin adding frameworks to your project. Note that Carthage only supports dynamic frameworks, which are only available on iOS 8 or later (or any version of OS X). We encourage using XCFrameworks as of version 0.37.0 (January 2021), and require XCFrameworks when building on an Apple Silicon Mac. Switching from discrete framework bundles to XCFrameworks requires a few changes to your project.