Can I use CocoaPods when creating a Cocoa Touch Framework?

Question

I\'m creating a new Cocoa Touch Framework (MyFramework.framework), which will have a dependency on Alamofire. This framework will be written in Swift. As a test I started a

Answer 1

Unfortunately CocoaPods doesn't support use with Cocoa Touch Framework target. I found a few references to this while digging through their issues on GitHub:

We don't really support integrating Pods into framework targets...
-neonichu on Nov 4, 2015

and

...in order for this to "just work", CP would need to do a recursive analysis of dependencies in your Xcode project and also somehow ensure that you would never use the build product in another context.
-neonichu on Jul 7, 2015

So far I've found two ways to deal with the issue:

The right way is to create a new pod spec for your framework and bring it in to your main project via CocoaPods. This resolves all of the problems CococaPods has with the dependency graph and is the recommended solution from the CocoaPods developers.

The easy way is to include the pods from your framework in your main project. This seems to work, but frankly I don't know why. This is the Podfile from my test project:

platform :ios, '9.0'
use_frameworks!

def myfirstframework_pods
    pod 'Alamofire', '~> 3.0'
end

target 'MyApp' do
    pod 'SwiftKeychainWrapper', '~>1.0'
    myfirstframework_pods
end

target 'MyFirstFramework' do
    myfirstframework_pods
end

Answer 2

Try adding the dependency on Alamofire in the framework's podspec as below

Pod::Spec.new do |s|

# Other setup 

# Dependencies
s.dependency "Alamofire"
# Other dependencies if any