Carthage/Carthage

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

15166 stars · 1549 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Carthage is a decentralized dependency manager for Cocoa (iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS) projects written in Swift. It builds dependencies into binary frameworks (including XCFrameworks) without modifying your Xcode project files or build settings.

Use cases

• add third-party frameworks to an iOS app without CocoaPods integration
• build dependencies into prebuilt binary frameworks for Xcode
• manage Cocoa dependencies in a decentralized way with a Cartfile
• build platform-independent XCFrameworks for Apple platforms
• cache and reuse framework builds to speed up CI

When to choose

• you want a simple, decentralized dependency manager that doesn't touch your Xcode project
• you prefer prebuilt binary frameworks over source integration
• you need XCFramework support for Xcode 12+
• your project already uses Carthage and you want to keep the workflow

When to avoid

• starting a new project where Swift Package Manager is sufficient
• you need automatic project file integration and workspace management like CocoaPods
• you depend on frameworks that no longer ship Carthage-compatible prebuilt binaries

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

package-manager build-tool cli developer-tools apple-ecosystem mobile-development cli cocoa swift ios dependency-management xcframework macos

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