List all dependencies used by a particular dependency in a Podfile

Question

For example, my Podfile has

pod x
pod y
pod z

When I run pod install, it installs 'a', 'b', and 'c', in addition to 'x', 'y', and 'z'. If I want to find out where 'a' comes from, (is it from 'x' or 'y' or 'z', or do they share), how do I find out?

Answer 1

After you run pod install you can look in your Podfile.lock. Here you should see entries indented under other entries. The indented entries are dependencies of the top level entries. For example:

- AFNetworking (1.3.4)
- ISO8601DateFormatter (0.7)
- Mantle (1.3.1):
  - Mantle/extobjc (= 1.3.1)
- Mantle/extobjc (1.3.1)
- OctoKit (0.5):
  - AFNetworking (~> 1.3.3)
  - ISO8601DateFormatter (~> 0.7.0)
  - Mantle (~> 1.3.1)
  - ReactiveCocoa (~> 2.2.2)
- ReactiveCocoa (2.2.4):
  - ReactiveCocoa/Core (= 2.2.4)
  - ReactiveCocoa/no-arc (= 2.2.4)
- ReactiveCocoa/Core (2.2.4):
  - ReactiveCocoa/no-arc
- ReactiveCocoa/no-arc (2.2.4)

Here Mantle is a dependency of OctoKit and Mantle/etcobjc is a dependency of Mantle (although this is a subspec).

You could also look at the dependencies of specific specs by running pod spec cat AFNetworking. This will print the contents of the most recent AFNetworking.podspec.json and you can see under the dependencies JSON keys what it depends on. In this case you may have to look at the subspecs to see what they depend on as well.