// the find
JohnSundell/TestDrive
Quickly try out any Swift pod or framework in a playground
A command-line tool that spins up a throwaway Xcode playground with a given CocoaPod or Git-hosted framework already installed, so you can poke at an API before committing to it. Built by John Sundell for iOS/macOS/tvOS developers who want to kick the tires on a dependency without touching their actual project's Podfile.
Solves a genuinely annoying problem cleanly — no more creating a throwaway Xcode project just to try a pod. Supports comparing multiple pods side-by-side in one playground, and lets you pin a specific version, branch, or git URL instead of just pod names. The CLI surface is small and the source is a single main.swift, so reading the whole implementation takes minutes.
Dead since November 2020 and built for Swift 4.1/CocoaPods-era tooling — pre-dates Swift Package Manager becoming the dominant dependency format, and it only knows how to fetch CocoaPods or raw git repos, not SPM packages, which is backwards for 2026. The primary install path recommends Marathon, a separate Sundell project that's itself unmaintained, so a fresh install is already fighting bit rot before you get to TestDrive itself. Issues are deliberately disabled with no alternative support channel, so any breakage from newer Xcode/Swift toolchains is yours to debug solo.