What is magicalrecord?

magicalpanda/magicalrecord — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-24

★ 10,717Objective-CAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((magicalrecord))
    What it does
      Core Data wrapper
      iOS and macOS
    Key features
      One-line fetch
      ActiveRecord style
      Custom fetch requests
    Status
      Deprecated
      Last version 2.4.0
    Install
      CocoaPods
    Topics
      Create and delete
      Fetch and save
      Import external data

mindmap root((magicalrecord)) What it does Core Data wrapper iOS and macOS Key features One-line fetch ActiveRecord style Custom fetch requests Status Deprecated Last version 2.4.0 Install CocoaPods Topics Create and delete Fetch and save Import external data

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Fetch all records of a type from Core Data in a single line instead of writing verbose fetch requests.

USE CASE 2

Quickly add, update, or delete stored objects in an iOS or macOS app with minimal boilerplate.

USE CASE 3

Migrate an older Objective-C app using MagicalRecord to Apple's improved native Core Data APIs.

What is it built with?

Objective-CCore DataCocoaPods

How does it compare?

	magicalpanda/magicalrecord	wenchaod/fscalendar	jessesquires/jsqmessagesviewcontroller
Stars	10,717	10,656	11,086
Language	Objective-C	Objective-C	Objective-C
Setup difficulty	easy	easy	moderate
Complexity	2/5	2/5	2/5
Audience	developer	developer	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Project is no longer actively developed, Apple's native Core Data improvements have superseded it.

So what is it?

MagicalRecord is an Objective-C library for iOS and macOS that simplifies working with Core Data, Apple's built-in system for storing and retrieving data on device. Core Data is known for requiring a lot of setup code and verbose fetch requests to do even simple things. MagicalRecord wraps around it to let developers retrieve, create, and delete stored objects with much shorter code. The library was inspired by the Active Record pattern from the Ruby on Rails web framework, where each database table is represented as a class and common operations like find, insert, update, and delete can be done in a single line of code. MagicalRecord brings a similar style to Apple platform development, reducing the boilerplate involved in setting up fetch requests and managing data contexts. Typical use cases include fetching all records of a certain type, finding specific objects by attribute, saving new data, and deleting records. The library still allows developers to customize the underlying fetch request when they need fine-grained control over how data is queried. The project is no longer actively developed. The README states it has been superseded by improvements Apple made to Core Data itself. The last stable release is version 2.4.0, and an experimental 3.0 branch also exists. Both are available via CocoaPods, the dependency manager commonly used in Objective-C and Swift projects. Documentation covers installation, getting started, creating and deleting entities, fetching, saving, and importing data from external sources. Community support is directed to Stack Overflow using the MagicalRecord tag, or to the GitHub issue tracker for confirmed bugs.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Show me how to fetch all records of a type called Person from Core Data using MagicalRecord in Objective-C.

Prompt 2

Using MagicalRecord, how do I create a new Core Data entity, set its properties, and save it in one block?

Prompt 3

My iOS project uses MagicalRecord 2.4.0 and I want to migrate to native Core Data. What is the modern Apple equivalent for a MagicalRecord findAll call?

Frequently asked questions