Cannot install cocoa pods after uninstalling, results in error

I removed cocoa pods because it claimed it had installed, but kept saying the command pod wasn't found afterward. When trying to reinstall cocoapods (sudo gem install cocoa pods -v) I get this error:

> ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::EPERM) > Operation not permitted - /usr/bin/pod

Any ideas?

As it has been pointed out below by Ramesh Ramchandaran, this is a cleaner way of doing it, instead of getting around the Security features of OS X.

sudo gem install -n /usr/local/bin cocoapods

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Original Answer

I'm assuming you're running OS X 10.11.

This is happening because Apple has enabled rootless on the new install.

If you type:

sudo nvram boot-args="rootless=0"; sudo reboot

in terminal.app, your computer will reboot with it disabled.

Once that is done, type:

sudo gem install cocoapods -V

the -V is for verbose and will spit out any errors if they happen.

As rootless does not affect /usr/local/bin, the following succeeds:

sudo gem install -n /usr/local/bin cocoapods

Any caveats?

Using home-brew or custom $GEM_HOME can help resolving the issue. I did clean installation of ruby with brew:

brew install ruby

Now the gem stuff seem to happen relative to my /usr/local/bin*, which is exactly what I needed.

I recommend installing all your gems into your .gem folder in your home folder to avoid using sudo or a ruby version manager as other people suggest.

All you have to do is update your .bash_profile by adding these 2 lines. (Don‘t forget to restart your terminal after applying these changes)

export GEM_HOME=~/.gem
export PATH="$GEM_HOME/bin:$PATH"

After updgrading from Yosemite to El Capitan ( 10.11.4), I kept getting the below error message while trying to 'reinstall' Cocoapods ( after trying out pretty much all the solutions under different Stackoverflow threads and the Cocoapods issue-page itself, for the same issue)

"Could not find a valid gem 'cocoapods' (>= 0) in any repository"

However, quit terminal, restarted system, created new Xcode project from the scratch and then when i did 'pod install', it worked.

Note: I was trying to use Alamofire and SwiftyJson cocoapods