Cocoapods dependency in pod spec not working

Solution 1:

I've faced the same issue and found that there is another way to solve this problem in old manner (thanks to @eliperkins).

Lets say you have a main project Downloader, which uses smaller project Player, which depends on micro project FFMpegPlayer. So what you want is to have a dependency in your Player.podspec, that would look like this:

s.dependency = 'FFMpegPlayer', :git => '...FFMpegPlayer.git' or 
s.dependency = 'FFMpegPlayer', :local => '../FFMpegPlayer'
s.dependency = 'FFMpegPlayer', :path => '../FFMpegPlayer'
s.dependency = 'FFMpegPlayer', :podspec => '../FFMpegPlayer/FFMpegPlayer.podspec'

But all that won't work with the latest version of Pods and it turns out :local was working as a side effect up to v0.17.1.

From now, you can specify clean dependency in Player.podspec:

s.dependency = 'FFMpegPlayer' (its ok if that spec does not exist in public)

In the Podfile of Downloader (main project) you just have to specify FFMpegPlayer before Player pod:

pod 'FFMpegPlayer', :path => '../FFMpegPlayer' (micro project)
pod 'Player', :path => '../Player' (small project which depends on FFMpegPlayer)

So, basically, all your subpods are now listed in main Podfile, that guarantees no conflicts between pods versions.

Solution 2:

The dependency directive of the podspec DSL supports only the name of the dependency and any optional version requirement. The :git option is not supported. You might use it in your Podfile or you might want to use a custom private repo in addition to the master repo.