Feature Request

Description

The current implementation relies on the CocoaPods 'pod' binary to be installed as a system-wide Ruby gem. Similarly, all other gems needed during build (and thus specified in Podfile) to be available there too. Bundler provides a way to declare per-project RubyGems dependencies similar to how node_modules works. It is used by many iOS projects to isolate from the host OS (different developers using different CocoaPods versions). Sometimes, a specific CocoaPods version has to be pinned, i.e. when a newer version had a regression (happened more than once in the past).

Platform(s)

• iOS

Preferred Solution

Thus, checkCocoaPods should run bundle first and see if

1. Bundler is installed
   • Could be done with which bundler but the version has to match as well. Simply running bundle and checking for errors catches both cases.
2. The project has a Gemfile

If so, invoke bundle exec pod install. Otherwise, continue as before by looking for CocoaPods binary installed elsewhere (e.g. system-wide or on a custom path).

Alternatives

Bundler is recommended by CocoaPods.org in such situations.

Additional Context

A typical Gemfile is situated at the repository root and might look like this:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

## iOS Development
# DEVELOPER: You now need to prepend calls to rubygems with "bundle exec "
# e.g. instead of calling "pod install" you now call "bundle exec pod install"
gem 'cocoapods', '1.11.2'
gem 'cocoapods-art', '1.1.0'  # Cocoapods Artifactory plugin used to access private Artifactory server
gem 'xcpretty', '0.3.0'       # For prettier `xcodebuild` invocations on the console

## Documentation
gem 'asciidoctor', '2.0.16'
gem 'asciidoctor-diagram', '2.2.1'

This project fetches iOS dependencies from a private Artifactory instance (NPM and CocoaPods mirror plus proprietary stuff). It's Podfile looks like this (stripped for brevity):

platform :ios, '12.0'
use_frameworks!

plugin 'cocoapods-art', :sources => [ 'cocoapods.github.com.proxy', ]

def capacitor_pods
  pod 'Capacitor', :path => '../../node_modules/@capacitor/ios'
  pod 'CapacitorCordova', :path => '../../node_modules/@capacitor/iOS'
  ....

Without Bundler support, every developer (and the CI scripting) has to install plenty of gems with a matching version. That would have to be documented in the README.md. By using Bundler, this is simplified. The iOS project would be bootstrapped like this:

gem install bundler
bundle exec pod install
xcodebuild ...

By the way, Bundler puts all it's dependencies in a folder called .bundler next to the Gemfile. This is perfect for caching during subsequent CI runs.