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Setup Pubnub on iOS in 7 Minutes Using CocoaPods

2 min read • Michael Carroll on Jan 6, 2016

This week, Jordan Zucker, iOS maestro at PubNub, shows us just how simple it is to get PubNub up and running in a brand-new iOS project using CocoaPods.  Here’s the rundown:

Download the iOS Getting Started Git Repository from the video

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects that makes it super easy to add and update 3rd party libraries in iOS projects. This is by far the best way to load PubNub’s iOS SDK.

Without CocoaPods, adding a 3rd party library to an iOS project can take up to 40 minutes, assuming you know what you’re doing. CocoaPods cuts this down to only 2-3 minutes, so you can spend that time doing something more productive, like building your cool app.

There’s not a whole lot to it, really. Just a few simple steps:

  1. Create project in Xcode
  2. Close project (project must be closed for the following steps)
  3. Create Podfile
  4. Run pod install from command line within project repository
  5. Open up a newly created workspace (in this case Example.xcworkspace)
  6. Navigate to ViewController.m
  7. Add #import <PubNub/PubNub.h>
  8. Add @property (nonatomic, strong) PubNub *client;
  9. Add PNObjectEventListener protocol to ViewController.m
  10. Initialize PubNub client instance using your pub and sub keys. Assign it to self.client instance variable
  11. Register ViewController as a listener for PubNub subscribe callbacks
  12. Subscribe to test channel
  13. Add label and button properties to ViewController class (declare them as IBOutlets)
  14. Update label with message from - (void)client:(PubNub *)client didReceiveMessage:(PNMessageResult *)message callback
  15. Add IBAction for button. Implementation should publish “Hello, world!” string on same test channel
  16. Connect button, label, and action in Main.storyboard
  17. Run on sim and click button to see the result!

This is only a simple walkthrough that shows you how to get PubNub up and running with a simple publish-subscribe function. For more in-depth information, visit our docs page for the PubNub iOS SDK. Happy coding!

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