Capacitor: CI build fails to install Pods as capacitor-cordova-ios-plugins is not checked in

[masimplo]

Description of the problem:
Building the project on the development machine that has run npx cap sync ios at least once everything works. Checking in the code and running the same build on CircleCI fails with the error

[!] No podspec found for `CordovaPlugins` in `../capacitor-cordova-ios-plugins`

as capacitor-cordova-ios-plugins is excluded from git due to the generated .gitignore inside the ios folder.
npx cap update ios generates the folder again, but it is not something I thing should be run on the CI, as it goes against the fact that the native projects are not build artifacts anymore.

Affected platform

• [ ] Android
• [x] iOS
• [ ] electron
• [ ] web

OS of the development machine

• [ ] Windows
• [ ] macOS
• [x] linux

Other information:

Capacitor version:
1.1.0
node version:
11.13.0
npm version:
6.7.0
CocoaPods version:

Steps to reproduce:

Link to sample project:

[jcesarmobile]

Same way you have to run npm install, npm run build and some other build commands, it's recommended to run npx cap sync in your CI. The native project is not a build artifact, but the cordova plugins still are. That folder is recreated every time you run update/sync commands, so we don't recommend to commit it, but you can change the .gitignore if you want to commit it.

[masimplo]

That makes sense, if you think of the cordova plugins as pods. Thanks for clearing that up.