The foremost goal of CocoaPods.app is to provide a full-featured and standalone installation of CocoaPods, instead of requiring users to install CocoaPods through RubyGems or Homebrew. In addition to easy installation, it also includes ease of updating.

It is able to expose this standalone installation in a command-line interface environment through the pod command-line tool, which it will request to install on launch of the application or through the ‘Install the Command-Line Tool…’ menu item under the application menu.

If you want to hack on CocoaPods.app:

You will need Xcode 7.3 and to be running on El Capitan.

git clone https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods-app.git --recursive
cd CocoaPods-app
rake app:prerequisites --quiet
open app/CocoaPods.xcworkspace

This will set up your environment with a compiled versions of: ruby, git, cocoapods (the gem), hg, openssl, etc into both destroot and workbench.

The main tasks can be found with rake -T:

rake app:build               # Build release version of application
rake app:clean               # Clean
rake app:prerequisites       # Prepare all prerequisites for building the app
rake app:update_version      # Updates the Info.plist of the application to reflect the CocoaPods version
rake bundle:build            # Build complete dist bundle
rake bundle:clean:all        # Clean all artefacts, including downloads
rake bundle:clean:artefacts  # Clean build and destroot artefacts
rake bundle:submodules       # Ensure Submodules are downloaded
rake bundle:test             # Test bundle
rake bundle:verify_linkage   # Verifies that no binaries in the bundle link to incorrect dylibs
rake release                 # Create a clean release build for distribution
rake release:build           # Perform a full build of the bundle and app
rake release:cleanbuild      # Create a clean build
rake release:sparkle         # Version bump the Sparkle XML
rake release:upload          # Upload release

If you’re working on the build system and want to debug intermediate steps, such as building Ruby, Git, Subversion, Mercurial, or Bazaar, be sure to checkout all the tasks with rake -T -A.

We have heard reports of issues with installing on custom ruby installations, we'd recommend using system ruby (rvm use system for example) during the installation process. Nothing will be installed into the system, it all goes into the destroot folder, but then you have the same environment we are using.

1. Run rake release.