What are the complications of introducing cocoapods into a collaborative iOS project?

Question

I would like to avoid dealing with frustration of importing other projects into my iOS project, so I'm considering using CocoaPods. One of the requirements of using this dependency manager is that I can no longer open .xcodeproj directly, and instead am required to open .xcworkspace.

While I could simply zip the project and send it over to a colleague, can I somehow send a workspace managed by cocoapods, or will the recepient have to have cocoapods installed?

Are there additional complications of using version-control tools, like Git for xcode workspaces managed by CocoaPods?

Thank you !

Answer 1

Check your Podfile and Podfile.lock in to source control. Add *.xcworkspace to your .gitignore and ask any collaborators to run pod install when they download it. This is the same process as anything with dependency management such as bundler for Ruby.

Answer 2

You need cocoaPods only to install pods, but not to build/run the project so you can continue to zip the folder containing your project and send it to a colleague that does not have pod installed.