将Cocoapods用于私有iOS框架

Question

I'm working on an iOS framework and I would like to make it available to other developers to integrate within their "client" apps by including them in their Podfile, such as:

pod 'MyFramework'

But I can't share the actual source code for it due to some licensing restrictions. The examples I found online for developing iOS frameworks and setting up their podspec files are typically pointing to a repository on github or others and that seems to make the source code available in the developers' app after they run:

pod install

Do I have to share the source code from my framework with the developer? What is the best way (on both the framework setup in cocoapods and the client app in its Podfile) to make sure I can share MyFramework.framework but not its source code? Note that I'm using Swift 3 for this project.

Thank you

al

---

Podfile (client):

target 'TestSDK' do
  # Comment the next line if you're not using Swift and don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!
pod 'MySDK', :path => '/path/to/SDK/'
  # Pods for TestSDK
end

MySDK.podspec:

Pod::Spec.new do |s|  
    s.name              = 'MySDK'
    s.version           = '1.0.0'
    s.summary           = 'A really cool SDK that logs stuff.'
    s.homepage          = 'http://example.com/'

    s.author            = { 'Name' => 'sdk@example.com' }
    s.license           = { :type => 'Apache-2.0', :file => 'LICENSE' }

    s.platform          = :ios
s.source = { :http => 'https://bitbucket.org/username/reponame/src/master/MySDK.zip' }
    s.ios.deployment_target = '9.3'
    s.ios.vendored_frameworks = 'MySDK.framework'
end  

Answer 1

Hopefully this will help others. I ended up solving this issue by hosting the zip file that contains the framework along with my README.md and LICENSE (and later a CHANGELOG.md) and pointed the podspec's s.source to it. The only issue that I have now is that on cocoapods.org, it shows that the language is in Objective-C rather than Swift, but I think that should be an easy fix. Otherwise, I'm now able to have the framework on trunk and use Pod MySDK in a client app.