What is a *.PODSPEC file? [closed]

Question

I'm an iOS developer and I am really interested in all about PODSPEC file:

1. What is it used for?
2. Why do we need it?
3. What is it helpful for?

Thanks a lot guys.

Hope in this question we will collect enough info, cause I have not found a thing about it.

Answer 1

This is the file extension for CocoaPods, which is distributed as a ruby gem. Which is available in twitter.

Also on github

EDIT:

Cocoapods (http://cocoapods.org/) is a dependency management framework for XCode. It allows you to declaratively define project dependencies and have them included in the build of your project. It's like Apache Maven or Ruby Gems for XCode.

Why you need this?

As an iOS developer, you certainly use a lot of code made by others, in the shape of libraries. You may not remember, but how complicated would your life be if you had to implement everything from scratch? Usually (since building static libraries manually is sooooo boring), you just add the library code into your project. But that has some disadvantages: Code that could be somewhere else is stored in your repository, wasting space. Sometimes, it’s hard to get a specific version of a library. There’s no central place where you can see which libraries are available. Finding a new version of a library and updating your project with it is boring and sometimes, painful. Downloading libraries manually creates a tendency to perhaps make some changes to the downloaded code and just leaving it there (making updating harder, as you’ll need to merge the changes you made with the code you download for the next version).

Copied from : http://www.raywenderlich.com/12139/introduction-to-cocoapods