How do you package an iOS framework for external consumption? Any recommended approach?

# ios

[dazza5000]

How do you package an iOS framework for external consumption? Any recommended approach?

[Sam]

At a minimum you can just zip up the framework bundle and distribute it. Most people choose a package manager like Cocoapods. Swift Package Manager may now work since it supports binaries now as well.

[dazza5000]

is swift package manager supported by apple

[dazza5000]

https://swift.org/package-manager/

[Nikolay Kasyanov]

IIRC SwiftPM’s binary framework support is coming with Xcode 12

[Nikolay Kasyanov]

but binaries have to be packed as XCFramework, the Kotlin’s FatFramework task doesn’t support it as of yet.

[Romain Dubreucq]

I managed to make it work with CocoaPods, let me know if you are interested

[kpgalligan]

I'm very interested in this. Have been wrestling with it for a few days. @Romain Dubreucq Do you mean CocoaPods and XCFramework? I can get an XCFramework to work directly, but when I try to push that into a cocoapods repo, it fails. I've also tried using the fat framework task, but that fails on archive.

[Romain Dubreucq]

Here is a working podspec that uses FatFrameworkTask

ExamplePodspec.podspec

[kpgalligan]

Interesting, thanks!

[Romain Dubreucq]

Feel free to ping me if you have issues

[kpgalligan]

Any chance you've ever seen this? We keep getting it when attempting to validate and push the archive to app store connect.

[kpgalligan]

I'm going to do a full clean and try again. See if I can figure that out.

[Romain Dubreucq]

You said that you were using XCFramework? Because I don't think that I'm using them on my side

[Romain Dubreucq]

The two last lines of the podspec are a workaround to fix an issue with Xcode 12 to prevent using arm64 in simulator (Xcode 12 is prepared to build for Apple Silicon)

[kpgalligan]

Not using XCFramework with that test. I have multiple different attempts going on. In this case, I get that error after running the fat framework task. It all seems to work fine, until validating and/or trying to distribute to the app store. Digging some more, though.

[kpgalligan]

Waiting on confirmation, but I’m pretty sure it was something else in the podspec and had nothing to do with fat framework at all. Kind of a big self-own, and another instance of “be careful with copy/paste”

[Romain Dubreucq]

Hello, you can share your podspec and your fat framework task if you want me to check

[kpgalligan]

No, we figured it out. We had reused another podspec which had spec.resources = '*' in it. I believe that copied the binary file directly into the framework resources, and the "Mach-O header" error was caused by the verifying seeing that file. Pulling out the resources line fixed the issue.