Find, Install, or Uninstall XCode CLI — is_xcode_cli

Set of functions that seek to identify whether XCode CLI was installed, allow XCode CLI to be installed, and removing XCode CLI.

Usage

is_xcode_cli_installed()

xcode_cli_version()

xcode_cli_path()

xcode_cli_install(
  password = base::getOption("macrtools.password"),
  verbose = TRUE
)

xcode_cli_uninstall(
  password = base::getOption("macrtools.password"),
  verbose = TRUE
)

xcode_cli_switch(
  path = install_directory_xcode_cli(),
  password = base::getOption("macrtools.password"),
  verbose = TRUE
)

xcode_cli_reset(
  password = base::getOption("macrtools.password"),
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

password: User password to access sudo.
verbose: Display status messages
path: Developer directory, or Xcode.app bundle, to make active. Defaults to the Command Line Tools location. Use xcode_toolchains() to see the available options.

Value

The Command Line Tools version from the package receipt, or NA_character_ when they are not installed.

Check if XCode CLI is installed

is_xcode_cli_installed() reports whether the Command Line Tools package is present, by looking for the compiler it installs:

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/clang

This is independent of which developer directory is selected. The previous implementation compared xcode-select -p against that path with identical(), so it reported FALSE on every machine where anything else was active, including the versioned Xcode that CI runners select.

For the selection, see developer_dir() and is_xcode_toolchain_usable().

XCode CLI Installation

The xcode_cli_install() function performs a headless or non-interactive installation of the Xcode CLI tools. This installation process requires three steps:

Place a temporary file indicating the need to download Xcode CLI
Determine the latest version of Xcode CLI by running softwareupdate
Install the latest version using softwareupdate with sudo.

The alternative approach would be an interactive installation of Xcode CLI by typing into Terminal:

sudo xcode-select --install

This command will trigger a pop up window that will walk through the package installation.

Steps of the Headless CLI Installation

The temporary file is created using:

touch /tmp/.com.apple.dt.CommandLineTools.installondemand.in-progress

From there, we deduce the latest version of Xcode available to the user through an R sanitized version of the chained shell commands:

product_information=softwareupdate -l |
   grep '\\*.*Command Line' |
   tail -n 1 |
   awk -F"*" '{print $2}' |
   sed -e 's/^ *//' |
   sed 's/Label: //g' |
   tr -d '\n'

Then, we trigger the installation process with sudo using:

sudo softwareupdate -i "$product_information" --verbose

where $product_information is obtained from the previous command.

Finally, we remove the temporary installation file.

rm /tmp/.com.apple.dt.CommandLineTools.installondemand.in-progress

These steps were obtained from Timothy Sutton's xcode-cli-tools.sh script and, slightly modernized.

Uninstalling Xcode CLI

The xcode_cli_uninstall() attempts to remove only the Xcode CLI tools.

Per the Apple Technical Note TN2339:

Xcode includes all of the command-line tools. If it is installed on your system, remove it to uninstall the command-line tools.
If the /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools directory exists on your system, remove it to uninstall the command-line tools

Thus, the xcode_cli_uninstall() opts to perform the second step only. We use an R sanitized shell version of:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

If the Xcode application is detect, we note that we did not uninstall the Xcode application. Instead, we request the user uninstall the Xcode app using the following steps:

Make sure that Xcode is closed. Quit Xcode if needed.
Open Finder > Applications, select Xcode and move it to Trash.
Empty the trash.
In addition, open Terminal and run:

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

Change Xcode CLI Location

The path reported by xcode-select may not point at the toolchain you want to build against. xcode_cli_switch() changes it, defaulting to the Command Line Tools:

sudo xcode-select --switch /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

Pass path to select something else, using a path from xcode_toolchains(). The target is validated first, and the selection being replaced is named, since the change is machine-wide and affects every build.

Note that DEVELOPER_DIR overrides the stored selection, so this has no visible effect while that variable is set.

If this does not fix the issue, we recommend using the xcode_cli_reset() function.

Reset Xcode CLI

The xcode_cli_reset() function uses xcode-select to restore the default Xcode CLI settings.

We use an R sanitized shell version of:

sudo xcode-select --reset

Examples

# Check if Xcode CLI is installed
is_xcode_cli_installed()
#> [1] TRUE
# Version of the installed Command Line Tools
xcode_cli_version()
#> [1] "26.6.0.0.1781586589"
# Determine the path location of Xcode CLI
xcode_cli_path()
#> [1] "/Applications/Xcode_26.6.app/Contents/Developer"