What is a development pod?

Question

I am new to CocoaPod and IOS in general, I am trying to use a framework I built locally in my podfile as follows:

# Pods for Example
pod 'OsonWidget', :path => "../OsonWidget/"

when I run a pod install and open the .xcworkspace of the project, the framework gets saved under Pods/Development pods. So my question is what is Development pods

Answer 1

Normally in Podfile you point to the repo with its git name and your intended version.

You’re not doing that. Instead you are pointing to the pod by the :path identifier in the Podfile.

Other than the two ways mentioned above, there are other ways to point to a repo.

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Obviously you are locally pointing to a pod, ie the pod was not fetched from the actual repo, implying that you own the pod and you’re developing the pod, you want to make changes to it and immediately see how the changes work for you in your Example app. Hence it’s named ‘development pods’.

Any change you make will be reflected into the Example project. Though if you add a new file, then you need to run pod install again so the projectfile gets updated.

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This is slightly different from other dependency managers where the term 'development' is used for dependencies that are necessary for testing, benchmarking, and other developer tasks. Example with Ruby Gems, you have add_development_dependency vs. add_runtime_dependency

With CocoaPods the decision to use something as development vs. deployment is per file i.e. whether or not a file imports a pod/framework or not.

Like you could have file in your test target and import the pod only in your test target and never include it in production e.g. the KIF pods. But mainly if you import a pod in your production code, then you'd need to import it again in files you have under you unit test target.