Load assets from bundle resources in Cocoapods

The problem

Yesterday I stumbled upon a problem when I loaded a xib file within my development pod.

I checked StackOverflow and found a few threads with the same issue:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23835052/load-image-from-cocoapods-resource-bundle
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25433110/how-do-i-load-a-xib-file-from-my-cocoapod

I used the following code inside my Pod library to load a xib file which was also located in the same directory as my Pod source code.

let nib = UINib(nibName: "MyNib", bundle: nil)

When you add this Pod to your project to test, you’ll get a runtime error telling you that the nib can’t be found. It seems that the xib files you provide aren’t copied over.

How to load bundle resources in Cocoapods

So I checked my Podspec file and the CocoaPod spec reference guide, and saw you have an option to create resource_bundles.  All you need to do is add the assets you want to be added to the bundle.  They key you specify will be the name of the bundle.

So I changed my podspec file to copy all xibs in my Pod project

s.resource_bundles = {
    'MyCustomPod' => [
        'Pod/**/*.xib'
    ]
  }

This code will add all the xib files inside the Pod directory (the ** will recursively check all subfolders of the Pod directory) to a bundle named MyCustomPod.

Having added this, it’s a good thing to run pod install again.

In your Pod code you can now add the following code to load the xib file from the bundle.

let podBundle = NSBundle(forClass: self.classForCoder)
        
if let bundleURL = podBundle.URLForResource("MyCustomPod", withExtension: "bundle") {
        
    if let bundle = NSBundle(URL: bundleURL) {
                
        let cellNib = UINib(nibName: classNameToLoad, bundle: bundle)
        self.collectionView!.registerNib(cellNib, forCellWithReuseIdentifier: classNameToLoad)
                 
     }else {
                
        assertionFailure("Could not load the bundle")
                
     }
            
}else {
            
   assertionFailure("Could not create a path to the bundle")
            
}