Creating a pod that relies on another pod

Question

Trying to build a Cocoapod library which is dependant of other published Cocoapod library I own, got the project in XCode to build OK, but running pod lib lint command for checking pod validity fails with error: include of non-modular header inside framework module on the header files of the library (pod) I'm depending on. All source is Obj-C not Swift.

I did try the following, according to the recommendations found here

• Setting the header files of the dependant library as public instead of project
• Setting CLANG_ALLOW_NON_MODULAR_INCLUDES_IN_FRAMEWORK_MODULES = YES for each target
• verifying that the relevant headers in build phases are under public.

but problem persists, I cannot publish the pod nor test it.

Update when I comment out the s.dependency 'OldPodIDependOn' line in my podspec file of my new pod then error disappears but the dependent headers are not found. if I do not include the pod I depend on in the Podfile under the ./Example folder, like so:

target 'NewPod', :exclusive => true do
  pod "NewPod", :path => "../"
  pod "OldPodIDependOn", :path => "../../OldPodIDependOn/"
end

then project will just not build in XCode since the OldPodIDependOn files are not part of the project. Got a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem.

Update 2 Also tried removing the :path => "../../OldPodIDependOn/" component to reference the pod that has been published instead of a local one - doesn't help.

Worth mentioning that this pod will include a UI hence a storyboard will be included and referenced, I added s.resources = 'Pod/Classes/UI/NewPod.storyboard' line to the podspec file, and removed the storyboard from the pod target compile sources (otherwise xcode won't build). I don't think that this has something to do with the problem but worth mentioning, maybe I'm doing something wrong in there.

What am I doing wrong? Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

To finally solve this issue I had to discard the workspace that pob lib create created - there was no way around it, I tried all possible combinations / recommendations / code modifications to get rid of the "non-modular header inside framework" errors but nothing seemed to work. pod lib lint ALWAYS failed.

I created my own static library xcode project from scratch, then run pod update on it after adding the dependent pod to the Podfile, then created a .podspec file for this lib and added the dependant pod header files to the "Copy files" build phase of the static lib target + libPods.a file to the "Link Binary with libs" build phase. Poof! no more "non modular header" errors from pod lib lint, even though I am practically doing the exact same thing. Lesson learnt is that pod lib create is not recommended for ALL cocoapod cases.

Answer 2

I had the same issue, and I used

pod lib lint MyPod.podspec --allow-warnings --use-libraries

When adding the --use-libraries option, it worked.

Answer 3

In general error: include of non-modular header inside framework module implies that one of the header files inside the resulting framework ( CocoaPods lints for both frameworks and libraries now ) is not stored inside the framework, or classed as a public header.

This can usually be worked around moving external imports into the implementation files, see this Modified to support using framework #353.