
iOS Swift Newbie Tips #8– pod repo update takes forever?
pod repo update
If you developed with cocoapods, then you may be familiar with the above command. And this one command alone can stall or take quite some time to run on your local environment. If you internet connection is sluggish, it will bog down your entire development life cycle.
Solution: Remove unnecessary local pod repos before you run `pod repo update`
Step 1: Find local pod repos
Run the following command:
pod repo list
The command will list how many local repos you have currently in your environment for cocoapods to check against each new versions whenever you run pod install
against our Podfile.
When you run pod repo update
, you are pulling all the latest changes on the master branch for each repo and this will take a while if you have more than one repo listed here.
Step 2: Remove unnecessary repos
Get rid of repos that you know for sure you don’t need is a great way to help speed up installing pods and updating the repo for your future projects.
In our case we just need to trust `cocoapods master repo`. So we will remove by them with the following commands. It may be different in your case, so definitely check with your development team.
pod repo remove appodeal
pod repo remove artsy

Step 3: Check local pod repos
Run pod repo list
Step 4: Run update
Run pod repo update
again and you should see that it run much faster!
This is a series of of multiple XCode / Swift / iOS Programming Gotchas to remind myself and hopefully relieve the stresses of many other beginner programmers whom are struggling with developing iOS apps via XCode.