Using Playground with CocoaPods

Issue #113

This is a follow up from my post Learning from Open Source: Using Playground on how to actually add a playground to your production project.

The idea is simple: create a framework so that Playground can access the code. This demo an iOS project with CocoaPods. See the demo https://github.com/onmyway133/UsingPlayground

This is also my question to this question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47589855/how-to-expose-your-project-code-to-a-xcode-playground-when-using-cocoapods/47595120#47595120

1. Add a pod

Create a new project called UsingPlayground. Create a Podfile with a pod Cheers because we want something fun 😄

platform :ios, '9.0'
use_frameworks!

pod 'Cheers'

target 'UsingPlayground'

2. Use the pod in your project

This is very straightforward. Just to make sure the pod work

import UIKit
import Cheers

class ViewController: UIViewController {

  override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    let cheerView = CheerView()
    view.addSubview(cheerView)
    cheerView.frame = view.bounds

    // Configure
    cheerView.config.particle = .confetti

    // Start
    cheerView.start()
  }
}

Build and run the project to enjoy a very fascinating confetti 🎊

3. Add a CocoaTouch framework

In your workspace, select the UsingPlayground project, add new CocoaTouch framework. Let’s call it AppFramework.

Then add source files to this framework. For now, just check file ViewController.swift add add it to the AppFramework target too.

4. Public

Swift types and methods are internal by default. So in order for them to be visible in the Playground, we need to declare them as public.

public class ViewController: UIViewController {
  ...
}

5. Add pod to AppFramework

In order for AppFramework to use our pods, we need to add those pods into framework target as well. Add target 'AppFramework' to your Podfile

platform :ios, '9.0'

use_frameworks!

pod 'Cheers'

target 'UsingPlayground'
target 'AppFramework'

Now run pod install again. In some rare cases, you need to run pod deintegrate and pod install to start from a clean slate

6. Add a Playground

Add a Playground and drag that to our workspace. Let’s call it MyPlayground

6. Enjoy

Now edit our MyPlayground. You can import frameworks from pod and our AppFramework

import UIKit
import Cheers
import AppFramework
import PlaygroundSupport

let cheerView = CheerView()
cheerView.frame = CGRect(x: 0, y: 50, width: 200, height: 400)

// Configure
cheerView.config.particle = .confetti

// Start
cheerView.start()

let myController = ViewController()

PlaygroundPage.current.liveView = myController.view

Remember to toggle Editor Mode so you can see Playground result