💊 pod-patch

Patching the Pods podspec files in React Native projects with the version tracking and Podfile updates.

Why

When developing something using Cocoapods packages in some cases you need to modify the Pod's podspec file. Often these cases are:

• Change the Pod dependency,
• Modify compilation flags, paths, parameters,
• Using the Pod with connected sources or libraries from another Pod.

You can do it by hand, download podspec file, modify, it and point to the local podspec file at the main Podfile. But what if I say:

• That you need to patch a few Pods?
• Their versions are changing too?
• What if there are a bunch of the patched Pods with the different versions?

How not forget what and where was patched and patch them on the new versions or Podfile changes?

🎈 This small tool was created to solve this!

Configuration

This tool is created for use in the React Native project.

As this tool doesn't require many parameters we are using the convention over configuration approach.

By default tool will look into the native/ios/pod-patch directory for the .patch files. The file name itself tells the tool which Pod and which version you want to patch the Pod's podspec and use it in your main Podfile.

The naming convention for the .patch files is [email protected] where podName is the name of the Pod and version is the Pod version to use for the patch apply.

For example, native/ios/pod-patch/[email protected] will tell that we want to apply patch from this file to the gRPC-Core podspec file for the 1.40.0 version.

Also, you can use it without a version. When using native/ios/pod-patch/gRPC-Core.patch tool will apply the patch from this file to the gRPC-Core pod with the version from your Podfile. When using without a version you need to have a record in the Podfile with the pod and version.

For example:

target 'App' do
    ...
    pod 'gRPC-Core', '1.40.0'

You can have as many .patch files as you need, the tool will use all of them.

Running

The tool can be executed as the npx pod-patch command in the native directory of your React Native project.

When running the tool will iterate through your .patch files checks if anything has changed and made some magic:

• Checks if there is no version conflicts in your Podfile and .patch file,
• Download a podspec file for your Pod from the cocoapods git repo to the native/ios/pod-patch/.patched/{pod-name}/{pod-version}/ directory,
• Apply the patch from the .patch file to it,
• Changes the record for the patched Pod in the Podfile to point it to the local patched podspec. For example, the record for the gRPC-Core will automatically change to:

target 'App' do
    ...
    pod 'gRPC-Core', :podspec => './pod-patch/.patched/gRPC-Core/1.40.0/gRPC-Core.podspec.json'

The tool checks if the Pod is already patched. If nothing changed from the already applied patches - it will do nothing.

Using with the yarn or npm i

A good practice is to use it linked with the running of yarn or npm i in the native directory in your install script in the package.json before the pod install execution.

This will updates/install the packages with the transparent checking if all of the Pod patches are up-to-date or need to be applied if something in the .patch file changed or Podspec has new changes in the pod dependency or version changes before the pod install.

If using this way with the git repo you can add native/ios/pod-patch/.patched directory to your .gitignore. Because when the tool runs it will check the existence of the local patched podspec files and create those that not exists.

Pod version changing

In case when the Pod version changed but you already have a .patch file for the previous version and it is already applied, but you want to upgrade the Pod and patch to the new version there are three simple steps:

First, if your .patch file in the native/ios/pod-patch has a version format i.e. [email protected] you need to create a patch file for the new version i.e. [email protected].

If the .patch file in the no-version format i.e. gRPC-Core.patch you do nothing here as this is an universal patch for all versions.

Second, you need to point to the new version of the Pod in your Podfile. For example, upgrading to 1.41.0, need to look like:

target 'App' do
    ...
    pod 'gRPC-Core', '1.41.0'

Third, you need to run npx pod-patch from your native directory and the tool will create a new patched Pod and point Podfile to it 🙌.

If you have a version-agnostic .patch file, actually you only need to do a second step only (point to the new version at the Podfile) and just run the tool!

Command line flags

• -h: Output the command usage help.
• -v: Output the script version.
• -p: Path to the directory where the .patch files are if it differs from the default native/ios/pod-patch.
• -d: Path to the Podfile if it differs from the default native/ios/Podfile.

Todo

• Resolving conflicts if there are a few patch files for one Pod present.