title	slug
SwiftUI Overview	/swiftui

The SwiftUI SDK is built on top of the StreamChat framework and it's a SwfitUI alternative to the StreamChatUI SDK. It's built completely in SwiftUI, using declarative patterns, that will be familiar to developers working with SwiftUI. The SDK includes an extensive set of performant and customizable UI components which allow you to get started quickly with little to no plumbing required.

Architecture

The SwiftUI SDK offers three types of components:

• Screens - Easiest to integrate, but offer small customizations, like branding and text changes.
• Stateful components - Offer more customization options and possibility to inject custom views. Also fairly simple to integrate, if the extension points are suitable for your chat use-case. These components come with view models.
• Stateless components - These are the building blocks for the other two types of components. In order to use them, you would have to provide the state and data. Using these components only make sense if you want to implement completely custom chat experience.

Dependencies

This SDK tries to keep the list of external dependencies to a minimum, these are the dependencies currently used:

StreamChatSwiftUI

• Nuke for loading images
• NukeUI for SwiftUI async image loading
• SwiftyGif for high performance GIF rendering
• StreamChat the low-level client to Stream Chat API

StreamChat

• Starscream to handle WebSocket connections

Installation

To get started integrating Stream Chat in your iOS app, install the StreamChatSwiftUI dependency using one of the following dependency managers.

Install with Swift Package Manager

Open your .xcodeproj, select the option "Add Package Dependency" in File > Swift Packages, and paste the URL: "https://github.com/getstream/stream-chat-swift".

After pressing next, Xcode will look for the repository and automatically select the latest version tagged. Press next and Xcode will download the dependency.

The repository contains 3 targets: StreamChat, StreamChatUI and StreamChatSwiftUI. If you'll use the UI components, select one of StreamChatUI or StreamChatSwiftUI. They both provide the same functionalities, the only difference is the underlying iOS technology (SwiftUI vs. UIKit). If you don't need the UI components, select just StreamChat.

After you press finish, it's done!

:::caution Because StreamChat SDKs have to be distributed with its resources, the minimal Swift version requirement for this installation method is 5.3. If you need to support older Swift version, please install it using CocoaPods. :::

Install with CocoaPods

In your project's Podfile, add: pod 'StreamChatSwiftUI', '~> 0.0.1'. It should look similar to the snippet below.

target 'MyProject' do
  # Comment the next line if you don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!

  # Pods for MyProject
  pod 'StreamChatSwiftUI', '~> 0.0.1'
end

The StreamChatUI pod will automatically include the StreamChat dependency. If you want just the StreamChat dependency, without the UI components, add pod 'StreamChat', '~> 4.0' to your Podfile instead. It should look similar to the snippet below.

target 'MyProject' do
  # Comment the next line if you don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!

  # Pods for MyProject
  pod 'StreamChat', '~> 4.0.0'
end

Now that we’ve modified our Podfile, let’s go ahead and install the project dependencies via the terminal with one simple command:

pod install --repo-update

The above command will generate the MyProject.xcworkspace file automatically.

To stay up-to-date with our updates and get a detailed breakdown of what's new, subscribe to the releases of getstream/stream-chat-swift by clicking the "watch" button. You can further tweak your watch preferences and subscribe only to the release events.