Cocoapods are the Devil

Never have I had more issues in creating new applications than in iOS. Dependency management is horrendous and it seem that CocoaPods is the mod common way to share libraries and frameworks.

As of writing this I am on macOS 14.7 (Sonoma) using Xcode 16.0. Here at the steps to get pods working in a newly made project.

The Setup

• Create the new Xcode project
• Right click on the application folder in the project and click “convert to group”

• Set the project Format to v15.0

• Close the project and open a terminal and run

pod init

• Edit the Podfile to looks something like:

platform :ios, '15.0'

target 'PodProjectSetup' do
  # Comment the next line if you don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!

  # Pods for PodProjectSetup
  pod 'Moscapsule', :git => 'https://github.com/flightonary/Moscapsule.git'
  pod 'OpenSSL-Universal'

end

• Save and run

pod install

• NOTE: This is a good time to do a git commit.
• Now you should have a .xcworkspace file which you can open as a project in Xcode.

But wait there’s more!

Now that you have something that has dependencies installed you have to make them all work, you’ll probably get something like:
clang: error: SDK does not contain 'libarclite' at the path '/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/arc/libarclite_iphoneos.a'; try increasing the minimum deployment target

• Go to your Pods and update the iOS Deployment Target

Then you might run into something like:

error: Sandbox: rsync.samba(97386) deny(1) file-write-create /Users/mikebush/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/PodProjectSetup-bpwnxypjwyzbgtcyxohskcbqdlhb/Build/Products/Debug-iphoneos/PodProjectSetup.app/Frameworks/Moscapsule.framework/.Info.plist.tZLzIQ (in target 'PodProjectSetup' from project 'PodProjectSetup')

error: Sandbox: rsync.samba(97386) deny(1) file-write-create /Users/mikebush/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/PodProjectSetup-bpwnxypjwyzbgtcyxohskcbqdlhb/Build/Products/Debug-iphoneos/PodProjectSetup.app/Frameworks/Moscapsule.framework/.Moscapsule.MflQ5i (in target 'PodProjectSetup' from project 'PodProjectSetup')

So go to the “Build Settings” and set “User Script Sandboxing” to NO

In the future I expect to run into more issues as apple pushed updates. But in the meantime I hope this helps someone.