24

This is very much a duplicate of xcode-select active developer directory error except none of those solutions worked for me.

$ sudo xcode-select --reset
$ sudo xcodebuild -license accept                                  
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
$ sudo xcode-select --install
xcode-select: error: command line tools are already installed, use "Software Update" to install updates

I don't even have xcode on my machine.

Ben
  • 60,438
  • 111
  • 314
  • 488

4 Answers4

52

The fix for me here was that my [ XCode > Preferences > Locations > Command Line Tools ] dropdown was empty. No idea why. But after clicking it and selecting the only available option my "active developer directory" error finally went away.

Mac Os 12.3.1 | Date: 5/4/22

enter image description here

Christopher
  • 1,639
  • 19
  • 22
  • Thanks! Such a trivialty... completely lacking feedback... I can now use the opendiff command-line on my brand new machine. There's a dark spot in the transparency and you helped me through it. – Paul Libbrecht Aug 30 '23 at 08:49
9

I had this problem because Xcode was installed in my user application directory (~/Applications) instead of /Applications. From the Github link above figured out I needed to run:

sudo xcode-select -s ~/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

(note the tilde). After this everything worked.

theothertom
  • 141
  • 2
  • 3
3

I had "xcode-select active developer directory error" too when installing Xcode beta. In your case you don't even need full Xcode, command line tools should work fine. Read this Github issue

Billion Shiferaw
  • 835
  • 10
  • 17
-2

This error completely contradicts that setting the path to /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools is the workaround for the latest XCode/MacOS combo failing to find the command line tool commands under /Application/Xcode.App/ with the default path setting.

jb_dk
  • 117
  • 6