Capacitor Plugin Development: Adding iOS podfile dependencies

A typical Capacitor plugin has two places to configure dependencies for iOS. The `Podfile` and the `.podspec` file. These two files serve two distinct purposes. The first is used for configuring dependencies for the plugin development environment. The second is for configuring dependencies used in the consuming project. These can be compared to the devDependencies and dependencies respectively that would be found in a package.json file of a web application project.

Typical plugin structure:

|- android/
|- ios/
     |- Podfile    // devDependencies
|- src/
|- PluginName.podspec   // dependencies

Example Podfile

platform :ios, '11.0'

def capacitor_pods
  # Comment the next line if you're not using Swift and don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!
  pod 'Capacitor', :path => '../node_modules/@capacitor/ios'
  pod 'CapacitorCordova', :path => '../node_modules/@capacitor/ios'
end

target 'Plugin' do
  capacitor_pods
  pod 'MyCustomPodDepName', 'pod.version.number'
end

target 'PluginTests' do
  capacitor_pods
end

Example PluginName.podspec

Pod::Spec.new do |s|
  s.name = 'PluginName'
  s.version = 'plugin.version.number'
  s.summary = 'A summary about my cool plugin'
  s.license = 'MIT'
  s.homepage = 'https://github.com/my/pluginrepo
  s.author = 'Me'
  s.source = { :git => 'https://github.com/my/pluginrepo.git', :tag => s.version.to_s }
  s.source_files = 'ios/Plugin/**/*.{swift,h,m,c,cc,mm,cpp}'
  s.ios.deployment_target = '11.0'
  s.dependency 'Capacitor'
  s.dependency 'MyCustomPodDepName', 'pod.version.number'
end

Multiple pod dependencies can be added this way by adding the required pods to the `target Plugin` section of the Podfile and additional `s.dependency` lines to the .podspec file