CocoaPods and GitHub forks
I will answer this question using an example. I have a fork of TTTAttributedLabel with some extra functionality I added here:
https://github.com/getaaron/TTTAttributedLabel
In order to use this in a Cocoapods project, I:
- Push my changes to my fork
- Configure my Podfile to get the changes & update
Once you've pushed your changes to your fork, get the SHA of your last commit. You can do this using git rev-parse origin/master | pbcopy or on the GitHub commits page for your project:
Then, you can specify the specific commit on your fork in your Podfile like this:
pod 'TTTAttributedLabel', :git => 'https://github.com/getaaron/TTTAttributedLabel.git', :commit => 'd358791c7f593d6ea7d6f8c2cac2cf8fae582bc1'
After that, pod update will update this particular commit from your fork. If you want, you can also make a podspec for your fork, but I find this approach simpler and I don't make changes frequently enough to justify a new workflow.
Do I need to work on my fork outside of my project and then use Cocoapods to install the changes? That's way to cumbersome of a workflow.
You can do it this way, but I usually:
- Edit the code inside my project and make sure it works
- Copy the changes over to my fork, by
- exporting a patch, or
- copying over the entire source code file
- Commit & push to GitHub
- Update the Podfile with the new SHA
- Run
pod update.
Or do I need to do something with submodules?
No, you don't need to.
Another option is to have your project reference the pod directly and not via github. This way you don't have to keep committing your fork or copying/pasting code just to test your changes. You can work with two different Xcode projects simultaneously and commit separately into their respective projects.
pod 'AFNetworking', :path => '~/Documents/AFNetworking'
CocoaPods Documentation: http://guides.cocoapods.org/using/the-podfile.html#using-the-files-from-a-folder-local-to-the-machine
