CocoaPods Bug

What's for

It seems that CocoaPods have a really huge bug about Asset Catalog, the root case came from 4 years ago, but not been fixed till today(2019/1/18). The latest 1.6.0-beta2 still have this issue. So I create a demo to trigger the issue and show the result.

Seems there are already some people found the issue, like https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/6159. But sadly, no changes was merged to fix this till today.

Issue

CocoaPods support you to use Asset Catalog xcassets inside Pods. You can use one of these two syntax to include a xcassets resource.

• Using resource_bundles

s.resource_bundles = {
'TestLibrary' => ['TestLibrary/Assets/TestLibrary.xcassets']
}

• Using resources

s.resources = ['TestLibrary2/Assets/TestLibrary2.xcassets']

However, when your Application project, including at least 1 Pods using the resources with xcassets. Then all the Pods' xcassets resource (whatever it come from), will be duplicated twice, inside your App's main bundle. It stored inside your App's product app's root path via Assets.car.

See the screenshot here. The App's main bundle Assets.car, contains all the other Pods's image resources. However, the TestLibrary itself also contains its image resources.

But, since TestLibrary using resource_bundles, its resource should not appear outside its bundle. The Main bundle should not contains 1-5.png.

Reproduce

Clone this repo, run pod install, then build and check the Product app.

You can use cartool to export images inside Assets.car

Fix or workaround ?

The bug was cause by the shell script phase. [CP] Copy Pods Resources. To fix that, just modify one line inside that script. The script is generated each time you run pod install. The original source code is here.

Original:

  # Find all other xcassets (this unfortunately includes those of path pods and other targets).
  OTHER_XCASSETS=$(find "$PWD" -iname "*.xcassets" -type d)
  while read line; do
    if [[ $line != "${PODS_ROOT}*" ]]; then
      XCASSET_FILES+=("$line")
    fi
  done <<<"$OTHER_XCASSETS"

Patch:

<     if [[ $line != "${PODS_ROOT}*" ]]; then
---
>     if [[ $line != ${PODS_ROOT}* ]]; then

It seems that the author want to do filter of that Pods folder, but use the wrong shell syntax. The condition check always passed. So that all your current working directory's xcassets will be compiled into main bundle.

To say, I'm also disagreed with this Find all other xcassets logic, which does not check the project logic group but based on directory. A better solution, is that we use xcodeproj to search all xcassets resources should be compiled for the current build target. Which base on the project but not file directory.

For workaround, add this patch in your Podfile's post_install script. Because you can not always assume all Pods using xcassets with resource_bundles. If at least 1 use that resource syntax, you'll enter the trap :)