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: Troubleshooting At first I assumed CocoaPods itself was broken, so I uninstalled and reinstalled it via gem — only to get: . 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: . Rootless What is ? Starting with , 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 comes from — the system places limits on administrator account privileges to some extent. The 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 , , , and (except ) directories. In early betas, you could disable with , 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: . About rvm Running again — no more permission error, but now: Another Google search: I needed to use rvm to set the Ruby environment. Install rvm: Install Ruby 2.2.2: Set Ruby 2.2.2 as default: Running again succeeded (and no longer needed sudo). Running in the project directory also succeeded. CocoaPods Xcode Plugin Back in Xcode, selecting from the menu still gave an error. Running in the terminal revealed that pod now lived in the rvm directory: I added to the GEM_PATH in the plugin menu, selected again, and it succeeded. Reinstalling Homebrew Before this, make sure to Google enough about , including Stack Overflow. Uninstall Homebrew: Install Homebrew: If the previous step has permission issues: References About OS X System Integrity Protection (SIP, Rootless) 'Rootless': What it is, and why you shouldn't care. What is the "rootless" feature in El Capitan, really?