cocoapods - 'pod install' takes forever

Question

I was trying to update the existing pods with the pod install command, but it takes forever to run.

The verbose mode shows it was stuck at the following

Answer 1

Pod Installation Steps

First Open Terminal:

chmod o-w /usr/local

sudo chmod o-w /usr/local

sudo gem install cocoapods

if already installed pod in your system then follow the below steps

sudo gem install cocoapods -V

sudo gem update --system

pod setup

cd /Users/apple/Desktop/Black\&WhiteImageDemo

pod init

open -a Xcode Podfile

pod install

Answer 2

As of 15th August 2016, the repo is a massive 2.39GB file. I opened the Activity Monitor to look at what the terminal was doing. It was downloading this huge file.

Answer 3

Found an alternative way to download cocoapods is to download one of the snapshots available here. It is a bit old but the .bz2 compressed file was much faster to download. Once I had downloaded it, I copied it over to ~/.cocoapods/repos/ and then I unzipped it using bzip2 -dk *.bz2.

The unzipping took a while and once it was over, I changed the extension of the newly uncompressed file to .tar and did tar xvf *.tar to unzip that. This will show the list of files being created and will also take a while.

Finally when I ran pod repo list while inside the project folder, it showed the master folder had been added as a repo. Because I still kept getting an error that it was unable to find the specification for the pod I was looking for, I went to the master folder and did git fetch and then git merge. The git fetch took the longest, about an hour at 50 KB/s. I used fetch and merge instead of pull, as I was having issues with it, i.e. fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly. It is now up to date and I was able to get the pod I wanted.

Answer 4

Possible solutions:

1. Updating Cocoa Pods may solve this issue
2. Clean and fresh install pods again

---

Updating CocoaPods

Open terminal and type:

$ sudo gem update cocoapods

---

Reinstall Pods

Step 1

Remove all the pods from your project (tricky part):

Manually

1. Remove all Pods records on Build Phases of your project (Marked Red)

2. Remove libPods.a under Frameworks folder

3. Now head to project directory and remove Podfile.lock*, **Pods folder and Workspace (Remove from Trash too).

Automatically using CocoaPods De-Integrate

Install

$ [sudo] gem install cocoapods-deintegrate

Run

$ pod deintegrate

---

Step 2

Here we are going through at installing the Pods again

Change your location your directory

$ cd yourprojectdirectory

Edit podfile by adding lines you need to it

$ open -a Xcode podfile 

or

$ nano podfile

FINALLY install the pod again

$ pod install

---

Hope this helps

Answer 5

I found another way to solve the problem

pod install --verbose --no-repo-update

it works for me.

Answer 6

you can run

pod install --verbose 

to see what's going on behind the scenes.. at least you'll know where it's stuck at (it could be a git clone operation that's taking too long because of your slow network etc)

to have an even better idea of why it seems to be stuck (running verbose can get you something like this

-> Installing Typhoon (2.2.1)
 > GitHub download
 > Creating cache git repo (~/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/GitHub/0363445acc1ed036ea1f162b4d8d143134f53b92)
 > Cloning to Pods folder
       $ /usr/bin/git clone https://github.com/typhoon-framework/Typhoon.git ~/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/GitHub/0363445acc1ed036ea1f162b4d8d143134f53b92 --mirror
       Cloning into bare repository '~/Library/Caches/CocoaPods/GitHub/0363445acc1ed036ea1f162b4d8d143134f53b92'...

is to find out the size of the git repo you're cloning.. if you're cloning from github.. you can use this format:

/repos/:user/:repo

so, for example, to find out about the above repo type

https://api.github.com/repos/typhoon-framework/Typhoon

and the returned JSON will have a size key, value. so the above returned

"size": 94014,

which is approx 90mb. no wonder it's taking forever! (btw.. by the time I wrote this.. it just finished.. ha!)

---

update: one common thing that cocoa pods do before it even starts downloading the dependencies listed in your podfile, is to download/update its own repo (they call it Setting up Cocoapods Master repo.. look at this:

pod install --verbose

Analyzing dependencies

Updating spec repositories
  $ /usr/bin/git rev-parse  >/dev/null 2>&1
  $ /usr/bin/git ls-remote
  From https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git
  09b0e7431ab82063d467296904a85d72ed40cd73  HEAD
  ..

the bad news is that if you follow the above procedure to find out how big the cocoa pod repo is.. you'll get this: "size": 614373,.. which is a lot.

so to get a more accurate way of knowing how long it takes to just install your own repo.. you can set up the cocoa pods master repo separately by using pod setup:

$ pod help setup
Usage:

$ pod setup

  Creates a directory at `~/.cocoapods/repos` which will hold your spec-repos.
  This is where it will create a clone of the public `master` spec-repo from:

      https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs

  If the clone already exists, it will ensure that it is up-to-date.

then running pod install