Resources in Swift Package Manager

The Swift Package Manager is a great tool to wrap up code and help compartmentalize some of your data. It is still evolving but is really powerful. I ran into a few issues when trying to figure out how to add image resources to a package.

Here are the ways that I used to figure this out.

Resources Folder

There is no Resources folder (by default), so you’ll have to make one for yourself. Put it into:

Sources/PROJECTNAME/Resources

Creating a Copy Phase

You’ll have to automatically set up a copy phase in your Package.swift file. It should be in the targets section for the main target. Mine looks like this by default.

        .target(
            name: "DLab",
            dependencies: []
        ),
        .testTarget(
            name: "DLabTests",
            dependencies: ["DLab"]
        ),

You need to add a resources: [.copy("Resources") ] to the main target section so it looks like this.

        .target(
            name: "DLab",
            dependencies: [],
            resources: [
                .copy("Resources")
            ]
        ),
        .testTarget(
            name: "DLabTests",
            dependencies: ["DLab"]
        ),

Now, if you *do not have anything in the Resources folder at this time, you’ll get a CodeSign error, which makes absolutely no sense (and will have you doing a lot of googling to no end). So put something (an image for example) into this folder and it will go away.

Still Not Working

OK, so this is still not working. I didn’t get the error when compiling and testing on MacOS target, but I do when compiling for iOS. Apparetly, the best way to do it is to specify the items in the Resources directly explicitly.

The following does actually work!

        .target(
            name: "DLab",
            dependencies: [],
            resources: [
                .copy("Resources/tree.png")
            ]
        ),

Now it does work. And if you need to have additional items, they need to go into their own .copy() framework.