Install weaver with Homebrew, Nix, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• weaver

Project history

Scribd introduced Weaver publicly in 2018 in a technology blog post titled 'A Painless Dependency Injection Framework for Swift.' The post framed Weaver as a response to growing Swift applications where manual dependency passing and singleton fallback patterns become hard to maintain.

The original design used comment annotations such as weaver: movieManager <- MovieManaging to declare dependencies in source code. The README later describes both property-wrapper and comment-based declarations, SourceKitten-backed scanning via Apple's SourceKit, dependency-graph linking, validation, and generated source output.

The project was eventually deprecated by Scribd. The current README begins with a deprecation notice saying Scribd no longer uses the technology internally, has decided to archive the repository, and will leave the code and resources available for reference or independent forks.

Adoption history

Weaver's adoption was strongest in the Swift/iOS architecture community rather than across general-purpose backend development. Its README links tutorials, a demo video, and an SF SLUG talk about maintaining a dependency graph with Weaver.

Its value proposition was compile-time safety. The Scribd blog contrasts Weaver with dependency-injection containers that can crash at runtime, arguing that Weaver validates the graph before the app runs and lets dependencies remain non-optional.

How it is used

A typical project adds Weaver to an Xcode build phase before Compile Sources, then invokes weaver swift with project and output paths. The generated dependency container code is compiled with the application, giving app code typed access to registered dependencies.

Weaver can be installed through Homebrew, CocoaPods, Mint, prebuilt release binaries, or from source. The README notes that CocoaPods was useful when a project needed a specific Weaver version because Homebrew did not automatically install specific historical versions.

Why package nerds care

Weaver is notable as an iOS-era code-generation answer to dependency injection: instead of relying on reflection-heavy runtime containers, it uses Swift source scanning and compile-time generated containers to keep app wiring explicit and type checked.

Its deprecation also makes it useful history. It captures a period before Swift macros and newer DI patterns, when SourceKit-based tooling and build-phase generators were a common way to add static analysis and boilerplate generation to Swift projects.

Timeline

• 2018: Scribd introduces Weaver as a lightweight dependency-injection framework for Swift.
• 2018-2019: Scribd publishes tutorial material showing Weaver in iOS dependency-injection and unit-testing workflows.
• Later project history: the README gains a deprecation notice stating that Scribd no longer uses Weaver internally and has archived the project for reference.

Related projects

• Weaver is related to Swift, SourceKit, SourceKitten, Xcode build phases, CocoaPods, Mint, Swinject, and other dependency-injection approaches for iOS and macOS applications.

Sources

• https://github.com/scribd/Weaver
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scribd/Weaver/master/README.md
• https://tech.scribd.com/blog/2018/introducting-weaver.html
• https://tech.scribd.com/blog/2019/dependency-injection-with-weaver-part-2.html