How to clear or clean specific pod from the local cocoapods cache

Question

How to delete or clear a specific pod from cocoapods cache?

Tried deleting the entire cache directly, it takes lot of time to get back all pods. How to view and remove specific pod from cache?

Following works (longer time commit):

# delete all cached pods
`rm -rf "${HOME}/Library/Caches/CocoaPods"`  

# delete local Pods/*
rm -rf "`pwd`/Pods/"

# pod update to fetch latest. After entire cache deletion, it takes lot longer to fetch and rebuild pod cache from scratch. 
`pod update` 

Just commenting out from podfile, and pod install again fetches old version from cache.

Having many instances of same pod in the pod cache can be troublesome when the pod is large, one of the pod currently in use has size of >1.5 GB in a project that is using cocoapods1.3.1 with Xcode9.

Answer 1

Clearing a specific pod

pod cache clean --all # will clean all pods
pod cache clean 'FortifySec' --all # will remove all installed 'FortifySec' pods 

Sample output of pod cache clean 'FortifySec', for pods not using semantic versioning, this could result in many copies of same pod in cache:

pod cache clean 'FortifySec'
1: FortifySec v2.2 (External)
2: FortifySec v2.2 (External)
...
...
18: FortifySec v2.2 (External)
19: FortifySec v2.2 (External)

Which pod cache do you want to remove?

Complete cleanup (pod reset)

rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/CocoaPods
rm -rf Pods
rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/*
pod deintegrate
pod setup
pod install

Example of pod cache list prior to clean

pod cache list

FortifySec:
- Version: 2.2.1
Type:    External
Spec:    /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Specs/External/FortifySec/ui99sd....podspec.json
Pod:     /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/External/FortifySec/yi23sd...-sdjc3
- Version: 2.2.1
Type:    External
Spec:    /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Specs/External/FortifySec/dsfs-df23
Pod:     /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/External/FortifySec/dfs0d-2dfs
- Version: 2.2
Type:    External
Spec:    /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Specs/External/FortifySec/u78hyt....podspec.json
Pod:     /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/External/FortifySec/e000sd
- Version: 2.2.2
Type:    External
Spec:    /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Specs/External/FortifySec/s2d-df.podspec.json
Pod:     /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/External/FortifySec/ds34sd....
- Version: 2.2.1
Type:    External
Spec:    /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Specs/External/FortifySec/sdfsdfdsf....podspec.json
Pod:     /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/External/FortifySec/edfs5d7...
AFNetworking:
- Version: 2.5.3
Type:    Release
Spec:    /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Specs/Release/AFNetworking/2.6.podspec.json
Pod:     /Users/j.d/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/Pods/Release/AFNetworking/2.6.3-4e7e2

Notice the multiple pod cache for - Version: 2.2.1. It's a good idea to do so to get rid of unnecessary disk space used by pod cache.

Answer 2

Safe steps with explanation, no pods deintegration included and React Native friendly.

1. Delete Derivate Data - Remove data that includes cached info of the project Example how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8bTvx0Aoyo

2. Remove the .xcworkspace file from iOS folder - This is the Xcode project file that gets created when you run pod install we want to recreate it in step 4. This project file uses pods and has a white coloured icon instead of the blue coloured base project without pods.

3. Remove Podfile.lock - Remove old dependencies info so we can recreate them in the next step.

4. Do a pod-install in iOS folder or npx pod-install in root with (React native) - Here we download the pod dependencies again and the pod files only the ones that are used from the latest package-lock are downloaded and integrated so removed package pods from package.json are gone. A .xcworkspace is regenerated.