CocoaPods and Conda in Sonatype Nexus Repository 3.19

October 02, 2019
By Brent Kostak

3 minute read time

We are excited to officially announce native format support for CocoaPods and Conda dependency managers in Sonatype Nexus Repository 3.19.

Over the last few months, Sonatype product teams have accelerated development for native support of new formats. Whether it be a format originated by our community, similar to APT, or driven by popular requests from developer input, we are listening.

The Challenger Build

As communities continue to grow, more developers use open source software from centralized repositories and package registries. Uncertainty enters the developer environment. CocoaPods alone has over 66 thousand libraries and is used by 3 million applications. This uncertainty can lead to disappearing code and a greater chance that certain packages will become inaccessible to developer projects and builds.

In addition to the above, the following problems can lead to broken builds for developers:

• Tag deletions for updating code or completely deleting tags on pods and packages.
• Repository deletions when authors are finished with code and do not realize other projects depend on their code.
• Renaming or changing the text case on repository names (GitHub allows developers and maintainers to easily rename or change the casing of a repository).
• Network outages when the internet is unavailable and developers cannot pull down the code (environmental situations authors and developers cannot control).

All these examples will break developer builds and progressively increase the risk of a significant impact as more developers use open source packages.

Clearly, there is a gap in consistent delivery of stable builds, but is there a solution? What can developers and organizations do to avoid these inefficiencies when using CocoaPods, Conda, and other dependency and package managers with their source code repositories?

Pods, Packages, and Proxies

In an ideal flow of components, the developer supply chain would be isolated from these problems of broken builds by using reliable and available packages at any time. These immutable snapshots of code, at a specific version, would be optimized for building applications. This is where Sonatype Nexus Repository and recent proxy support announcements start to unfold the solution. Sonatype Nexus Repository is the most widely used universal binary repository manager. Acting as an API Server in the middle of version control systems and central repositories, Sonatype Nexus Repository is setup to store packages on your local storage.

As of Sonatype Nexus Repository 3.19.0, developers who use the Xcode platform to develop iOS applications with CocoaPods or the many other programming languages that Conda supports (Python, R, C, Ruby etc.) can now create local proxy repositories for pods and packages.

Several benefits of using Sonatype Nexus Repository with dependency and package managers can be seen below:

• Reliable, continuous access from locally caching CocoaPods and Conda packages.
• Extensive search capabilities to easily find pods and packages.
• Faster builds from reduced network traffic.
• Privacy control to filter all package requests through Sonatype Nexus Repository.
• Full integration to build ecosystem and CI/CD pipelines.
• Building offline for developers who wish to work remotely.
• 100% open source and free with Sonatype Nexus Repository OSS (now known as Sonatype Nexus Repository Community Edition).

Running Sonatype Nexus Repository in your organization allows complete control over your dependencies, increases developer productivity, and delivers the highest quality builds without road blocks.

Throttle Up

Our team here at Sonatype has a mission to equip users, customers, and first-timers with everything they need to understand the benefits of using Sonatype Nexus Repository. The path for open source innovation, depth of format coverage, and advanced repository management has been paved.

Further knowledge and resources below:

• Sonatype Community - Head over to the Sonatype Community to surround yourself with like-minded developers, users, and innovators. You can also check us out on Twitter: @sonatype.

Written by Brent Kostak

Brent is the Director of Product Marketing connecting developers and DevOps communities to Sonatype Nexus tools and technologies.