iOS build breaks with multiple plugins with podfiles

[lini]

Tell us about the problem

If an app has multiple plugins and they have podfiles with a platform defined like

platform :ios, '9.0'

the combined podfile will have multiple platform lines and the build will fail.

Which platform(s) does your issue occur on?

iOS

Please provide the following version numbers that your issue occurs with:

nativescript@4.0.1
nativescript-imagepicker@6.0.1
kinvey-nativescript-sdk@3.10.4

Please tell us how to recreate the issue in as much detail as possible.

Create an app, add nativescript-imagepicker@6.0.1, add kinvey-nativescript-sdk@3.10.4. Try to build app for iOS.

Reported in NativeScript/nativescript-imagepicker#186

[RobertGardner]

Is there any resolution to this? It seems that the CLI, when merging plugin podfiles, should check for platform :ios conflicts and fix them, probably by keeping only the one with the highest version number.

(It looks like this would happen in cocoapods-service:applyPluginPodfileToProject().)

[NickIliev]

+1 from kinvey-nativescript-sdk plugin. https://github.com/Kinvey/nativescript-sdk/blob/master/platforms/ios/Podfile#L1

[sivamamidi-REISys]

+1 nativescript-plugin-firebase

[burkongla]

+1 nativescript-stripe

[jjstrat3]

Anyone here have a workaround for this? This seems like a major issue and it's currently blocking us from using another plugin.

[burkongla]

One work around if you are building locally:
You can first build the project, remove the extra platform line from the built Info.plist inside platforms/ios and build again without removing the platforms folder of course. You have to do this every time you build after removing the platforms folder though.

In our case we also want to use nativescript sidekick, and I do not know what to do in that case, so other suggestions would be nice.

[RobertGardner]

I have found with nativescript-firebase if you completely remove the "ml_kit" entry from firebase.nativescript.json then it does not emit the platform :ios line. That was enough to solve the problem for me.

Since NativeScript doesn't seem to be doing anything about this, maybe plugin authors should just remove that line from their Podfiles, document which iOS version the plugin requires, and rely on developers to honor it. I'd be happy to do that for nativescript-stripe until NativeScript addresses this issue if it will help anyone.

[GeorgeKyriakou]

@RobertGardner what if I am using the ml_kit library, and need to have it in the .json file?
Is someone looking at this???

[RobertGardner]

It looks like a Bug label was added on May 21, but has there been activity since then? What is NativeScript's official response to this?

A workaround that can be done at install time (as opposed to build time as suggested by @burkongla ) would be to find platforms/ios/Podfile for the offending plugin(s) and delete the platform ios line there. This would only need to be done when you (re)install the plugins (such as after npm i) instead of after every build.

I don't use NativeScript Sidekick, so I don't know if it tries to reinstall the plugins on every build (though that could be time consuming, so I doubt it).