What are Cocoa Pods?
CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It has over ten thousand libraries and can help you scale your projects elegantly.
CocoaPods is an application level dependency manager for the Objective-C programming language and any other languages that run on the Objective-C runtime, such as RubyMotion,[1] that provides a standard format for managing external libraries. It was developed by Eloy Durán and Fabio Pelosin, who continue to manage the project with the help and contributions of many others.[2] They began development in August 2011[3] and made the first public release[4] on September 1, 2011. CocoaPods is strongly inspired by a combination of the Ruby projects RubyGems and Bundler.
CocoaPods focuses on source-based distribution of third party code and automatic integration into Xcode projects.
CocoaPods runs from the command line and is also integrated in JetBrains' AppCodeintegrated development environment.[5] It installs dependencies (e.g. libraries) for an application by specification of dependencies rather than manual copying source files.[6] Besides installing from many different sources, a “master” spec repository—containing metadata for many Open-Source libraries—is maintained as a git repository and hosted on GitHub.[7] Over 3000 libraries are currently available for use.[8]