Automated CocoaPod releases with GitHub Actions

Andrey Volodin

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The Startup

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3 min read

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Sep 10, 2019

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In this article we are going to quickly cover a trivial GitHub Actions setup I use for my open source Metal library Alloy to automatically publish new versions into CocoaPods trunk register.

First, we will need to grab a registration token from CocoaPods. You can get it by using the pod trunk register command.

pod trunk register your@email.com -- description "GitHub Actions Token"

You will receive an e-mail with a confirmation link to confirm you are the owner of that e-mail. Once you’ve confirmed the token you can obtain it from private files using the following command:

grep -A2 'trunk.cocoapods.org' ~/.netrc

You will see something like this:

machine trunk.cocoapods.org
 login <your@email.com>
 password <TOKEN>

Copy the token you’ve got and then go to Settings of your repo:

Next, open Secrets in the side menu:

Press “Add a new secret” and create a new secret named COCOAPODS_TRUNK_TOKEN with the value of token you’ve just copied.

Setting up a GitHub Action

Okay, once you’ve done with the CocoaPods you are ready to proceed onto writing your first GitHub Action. Go to Actions of your repo and press “Set up a workflow yourself”:

And then replace the script with the following:

name: CIon:
  push:
    branches:
    - master
    
jobs:
  build:  runs-on: macOS-latest
    
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1
    - name: Publish to CocoaPod register
      env:
        COCOAPODS_TRUNK_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.COCOAPODS_TRUNK_TOKEN }}
      run: |
        pod trunk push <YOURLIBRARY>.podspec

What this means is pretty clear:

1. Our script will run on every push into master branch of a repo
2. We will have only one build job which will run on latest macOS (you can specify macOS-10.14 for example
3. At first we will checkout our repo using another built-in action called actions/checkout@v1
4. We are declaring a COCOAPODS_TRUNK_TOKEN that is initialized with a secret value that we specified earlier so that nobody can access publishing even though your library and actions may be open-sourced
5. Finally, we call our command to push library into CocoaPods register

I use this 3 steps process to publish my libs:

1. Create a tag in the branch you are going to merge
2. Bump a version number inside a podspec to match the latest tag you’ve created
3. Merge branch into master and action will be triggered

Final words

We’ve just created a minimal example on how to automatically publish your libraries safely and securely. Of course you shouldn’t stop there: you can add automatic unit-test launches or more complex release pipelines into that.

If you have any questions please hit me up on Twitter.