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CocoaPods and Xcode Plugin Issues After Upgrading to OS X 10.11
The Situation
I upgraded the MBPR at home to OS X 10.11, and a few apps stopped working. Software DRM in China is quite effective it seems — had to Google "XXX crack" for each one and reinstall.
To make matters worse, Xcode quietly auto-upgraded to the notoriously problematic version 7.3 while I wasn't looking. I was too lazy to roll it back. A few plugins seemed broken though — reinstalling VVDocumenter-Xcode fixed it. But cocoapods-xcode-plugin wouldn't work, showing the error: Resolved command path for "pod" is invalid.
Troubleshooting
At first I assumed CocoaPods itself was broken, so I uninstalled and reinstalled it via gem — only to get: ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::EPERM) Operation not permitted - /usr/bin/pod. I had used sudo, so why the permission error?
There's a solution on Stack Overflow at Cannot install cocoa pods after uninstalling, results in error: sudo nvram boot-args="rootless=0"; sudo reboot.
Rootless
What is rootless?
Starting with El Capitan, Apple introduced System Integrity Protection (SIP). Apple decided that there are certain things third-party apps will never be permitted to do, making them more restricted than before. This is where the term rootless comes from — the system places limits on administrator account privileges to some extent.
The rootless feature restricts certain operations to only Apple-signed applications. So even third-party apps running as root cannot perform some operations.
In plain terms: the default user account looks like it has root privileges, but in reality even the root user cannot modify the /System, /bin, /sbin, and /usr (except /usr/local) directories.
In early El Capitan betas, you could disable rootless with sudo nvram boot-args="rootless=0"; sudo reboot, but this was blocked in the final release (and apparently doesn't work even if you try).
Seeing this, I had a sinking feeling and tried the gem command — sure enough, it was broken. So I updated RubyGems: gem update --system.
About rvm
Running gem install cocoapods again — no more permission error, but now: activesupport requires Ruby version >= 2.2.2.
Another Google search: I needed to use rvm to set the Ruby environment.
Install rvm:
curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
Install Ruby 2.2.2:
rvm install 2.2.2
Set Ruby 2.2.2 as default:
rvm 2.2.2 --default
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.2.2p95 (2015-04-13 revision 50295) [x86_64-darwin14]
Running gem install cocoapods again succeeded (and no longer needed sudo).
Running pod install in the project directory also succeeded.
CocoaPods Xcode Plugin
Back in Xcode, selecting pod install from the menu still gave an error. Running where pod in the terminal revealed that pod now lived in the rvm directory:
$ where pod
/Users/BloodLine/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.2/bin/pod
I added ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.2/bin to the GEM_PATH in the plugin menu, selected pod install again, and it succeeded.
Reinstalling Homebrew
Before this, make sure to Google enough about 10.11 Homebrew, including Stack Overflow.
Uninstall Homebrew:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall)"
Install Homebrew:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
If the previous step has permission issues:
sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local
References
About OS X System Integrity Protection (SIP, Rootless)