The CocoaPods client does not provide a way to deploy packages and mostly (though not only) relies on a Git repository to host the pod's code.
To deploy a pod into Artifactory, you need to use Artifactory's REST API or the Web UI.
A pod is a simple tar.gz file which contains your project code as well as a .podspec or .podspec.json file describing the package metadata.
Pod filetypes
Although more extensions are supported by the client, the Artifactory CocoaPods local repositories currently only support pods that are archived as tar.gz