Igor Kulman

Using CocoaPods to just build frameworks for use elsewhere

· Igor Kulman

I am definitely not a fan of CocoaPods, I use Carthage in all of my projects. It is not ideal but I have a way of using it that works for me.

Recently I was faced with a problem that made me use CocoaPods but in a quite different way, just to build some frameworks to be used elsewhere without CocoaPods.

The problem

I use GRDB.swift to work with the database in iOS applications, especially because it support using SQLCipher to have the database encrypted. The current version 3.x has some problem when used by Xcode 10.2 and Swift 5 so using the latest 4.0 is recommend.

GRDB.swift never supported Carthage but there was always a way to make it work. I usually just needed to delete some of the shared schemes and run carthage build instead of carthage bootstrap. I was not able to make Carthage work with 4.0, mainly because the targets changed. There is no GRDBCipher target for use with SQLCipher anymore, just a podspec definition

  s.subspec 'SQLCipher' do |ss|
    ss.source_files = 'GRDB/**/*.swift', 'Support/*.h'
    ss.framework = 'Foundation'
    ss.dependency 'SQLCipher', '>= 3.4.0'
    ss.xcconfig = {
      'OTHER_SWIFT_FLAGS' => '$(inherited) -D SQLITE_HAS_CODEC -D GRDBCIPHER -D SQLITE_ENABLE_FTS5',
      'OTHER_CFLAGS' => '$(inherited) -DSQLITE_HAS_CODEC -DGRDBCIPHER -DSQLITE_ENABLE_FTS5',
      'GCC_PREPROCESSOR_DEFINITIONS' => '$(inherited) SQLITE_HAS_CODEC=1 GRDBCIPHER=1 SQLITE_ENABLE_FTS5=1'
    }
end

It looks like only using CocoaPods and SwiftPM is now supported, there is not even an easy way to do manual installation.

I had to decide how to integrate 4.0 to my project in the best way possible.

Possible solutions

There were a few solution that came to mind

Using CocoaPods

This would be the easiest solution. I would just create a Podfile with

# GRDB with SQLCipher 3
pod 'GRDB.swift/SQLCipher'
pod 'SQLCipher', '~> 3.4'

and make it integrate into the existing workspace of my application.

It would probably work but I really do not want to use CocoaPods and it would be a bit strange having 2 libraries added via CocoaPods and all the other libraries via Carthage.

Creating projects for GRDB.swift and SQLCipher and integrating them

Another option would be to create separate projects for GRDB.swift and SQLCipher, add them to the workspace of the application and link everything properly. This is easier said than done.

Creating a project for GRDB.swift and applying the special build flags from he podspec shown earlier would not be a problem. The problem would be creating a project for SQLCipher, it would have to be done just from reading their podspec.

Not impossible but managing updates would be quite hard even when adding both libraries as git submodules.

Using CocoaPods just to build GRDB and SQLCipher and use the .framework files directly

I came up with a different solution. The main idea was to let CocoaPods generate and build a project with both libraries and then use the resulting .framework files in my main project directly. This solution needed a bit of knowledge and tinkering but I decided to go for it.

Creating a separate project

I created a new iOS framework project called GRDBCipher. The name is not important and it is a completely empty project, no filed other than what the Xcode template creates.

I then added GRDB.swift and SQLCipher using CocoaPods to this project

platform :ios, '10.0'
use_frameworks!

target 'GRDBCipher' do
    # GRDB with SQLCipher 3
    pod 'GRDB.swift/SQLCipher', :git => 'https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift', :branch => 'GRDB-4.0'
    pod 'SQLCipher', '3.4.2'
end

When I built the project Xcode created GRDB.framework and SQLCipher.framework that looked ready to be used.

Dealing with multiple architectures

When you do a build in Xcode you do it for a certain architecture. Either for the iOS simulator or for a real ARM device. GRDB.framework and SQLCipher.framework created by building the new GRDBCipher project can only be used either with the iOS simulator or a real device. To fix this issue you have to create a so called “fat” framework containing all the architectures.

The easiest way to do this was adding an aggregate target (File | New target | Cross-platform | aggregate) to the Pods project. I changed its build configuration to Release and added both GRDB.framework and SQLCipher.framework as its Target dependencies.

I then needed to add scripts to build both frameworks for all the architectures and merge them together using lipo. I copied the scripts for this from an Instabug post about Creating and Distributing an iOS Binary Framework.

I had to make slight changes to the script because GRDB.swift uses GRDB.swift as the scheme name but GRDB.framework instead of GRDB.swift.framework as the name of the framework that actually gets built. I also added a script that copies the resulting fat GRDB.framework and SQLCipher.framework to a directory in the main project.

Every time I updated the libraries using CocoaPods the project got regenerated, but I could then just revert the project changes so I did not have to add the aggregated target again.

With this setup, whenever I need to build a new version of GRDB.swift, I just update CocoaPods in the GRDBCipher project and run the aggregate target. After a few minutes the frameworks are built and ready in the correct folder.

I created a Github repository showing the whole project: https://www.github.com/igorkulman/GRDBCipher.

Adding the frameworks to the main project

Both GRDB.framework and SQLCipher.framework built as fat libraries can be embedded to the application just like any other static framework.

Update: Meanwhile I found a much simpler solution. Just install the cocoapods-rome plugin for CocoaPods and use it in a Podfile

platform :ios, '10.0'
use_frameworks!

plugin 'cocoapods-rome', {:pre_compile => Proc.new { |installer|
installer.pods_project.targets.each do |target|
    target.build_configurations.each do |config|
      config.build_settings['BITCODE_GENERATION_MODE'] = 'bitcode'
      config.build_settings['ENABLE_BITCODE'] = 'YES'
      config.build_settings['APPLICATION_EXTENSION_API_ONLY'] = 'YES'
    end
end

target 'GRDBCipher' do
    # GRDB with SQLCipher 4
    pod 'GRDB.swift/SQLCipher'
    pod 'SQLCipher', '~> 4.0'
end

With this Podfile running pod install will build both GRDB.framework and SQLCipher.framework.

See also