Hi @grav

If you have podfile.lock checked in that operation should be pretty fast. As you say though it could be faster if cocoapods gave you a way to integrate only. There are a couple of possible solutions:

• this issue tracks a post gen hook #479, which if you are using xcodegen caching, would then only run pod install if the project needed to be generated. You could also do this with a script that cleverly checked the output of xcodegen as well. This brings down the need to run pod install so often.
• check the exact changes that the cocoapods integration process does to your project and just add them manually to your project spec. I haven't looked in a while but I'm guessing this is a combination of xcconfig paths, build settings, and run scripts. (This could potentially be added as a feature to XcodeGen as a integrateCocoapods option)
• move from cocoapods to carthage. XcodeGen integrates with this much better
• check in your project and only regenerate on merge conflicts

A postGenCommand has been added here #759
This will allow for only running pod install if the project has actually changed