Swift Package Manager

Swift Packages are Apple's new first-party tool for software dependencies. Traditionally Capacitor has used Cocoapods for managing depenacies internally and for plugins, however now is the time to move to a supported solution.

In Capacitor 6, you can now choose between using Cocoapods or Swift Package Manager (SPM). Almost all current capacitor-team supported plugins support SPM, namely the plugins in capacitor-plugins.

We've tried our best to make sure you don't have to change much about how you work with Capacitor to use SPM, but there are a few things to understand.

How it works

When a Capacitor project is using SPM we use a 'Base SPM' package that will serve as the place that references all of your projects dependancies:

The Capacitor CLI will modify the CapAPP-SPM package when you sync new plugins. It is important you do not touch the contents here because the CLI can and will change things.

Using SPM in a new Capacitor project

First we'll start with our normal npm init @capacitor/app:

Now we want to add the iOS platform to our project:

npm install @capacitor/ios

Next let's build the web project:

npm run build

After that is complete we can add the iOS project. We need to add the option --packagemanager SPM to the normal add command:

npx cap add ios --packagemanager SPM

Now you can use npx cap open ios to open the iOS project and run your app from there.

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Add and use a Capactior Plugin with SPM

So let's add a plugin to this project and do something with that plugin.

Start with installing the Capacitor App plugin:

npm install @capacitor/app

Then let's sync the web app. This will add the App plugin SPM to the iOS project:

npx cap sync

You can now use the App plugin normally.

More details coming soon

Converting existing plugins to SPM

More details soon, but check this repository out: https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor-plugin-converter

Troubleshooting

After adding plugins try to 'reset package caches' in Xcode: