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Command Line Developer Tools

Hey I keep getting this pop up every time I open up visual studio code or run a Mac ports command. It says "The 'python3' command requires the command line developer tools..." per attached screenshot. I've downloaded it about half a dozen times over the past week and yet it keeps asking me to download. What gives?

MacBook Air Apple Silicon

Posted on Oct 22, 2022 8:53 PM

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13 replies

Oct 29, 2022 4:02 AM in response to wsa225

I was experiencing this when running HomeBrew and also "installed" this rmyriad times with no resolution. Since the other respondent wasn't terribly helpful and just wanted to blame your IDE, I moved on to another search result that led me to https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=for%20Xcode. I downloaded the DMG and installed using the GUI, and the problem disappeared. (If you don't want "release candidates", you've got to scoll down a bit to find the Tools for v.14.) Hope this resolves your issue!

Oct 29, 2022 6:08 AM in response to eshton184

eshton184 wrote:

the other respondent wasn't terribly helpful and just wanted to blame your IDE, I moved on to another search result that led me to https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=for%20Xcode. I downloaded the DMG and installed using the GUI, and the problem disappeared. (If you don't want "release candidates", you've got to scoll down a bit to find the Tools for v.14.) Hope this resolves your issue!

And so your solution is to download a different IDE? Isn't that also blaming the 3rd party IDE?

Oct 24, 2022 7:52 PM in response to wsa225

wsa225 wrote:

I'll report with VS Code, but like I said, this happens outside of Visual Studio. How do you know it's a Visual Studio issue?


You tell me. You’ve reinstalled the tools a half-dozen times. Presumably tried a compiler, too. Which worked, or you’d have mentioned. Which leaves you with whatever is reporting the error as potentially getting confused. Which means somebody that knows more about the details of the tool checks would best be involved. Which means checking with VCS and MacPorts folks.


I mean, you could try re-installing the command line tools a few more times before trying something else, no? Or you could see if the add-on tools have some known error or oddity or down-revision issue…

Oct 29, 2022 7:26 AM in response to eshton184

The OS wasn’t asking for the tools to be installed, the third-party IDE was. And it was the third-party IDE that was showing the messages, and not usage of (for instance) the compilers from the command line. Hence the suspicion that some detection check went wrong, Wouldn’t be the first time in programming history that a check separate from and not based on direct usage went sideways, either.

Oct 29, 2022 8:12 AM in response to MrHoffman

Look, I’m nowhere near as technical as you nor am I pretending to be. You’re correct that my verbalization of what was calling the command was inaccurate, but the same result was happening when something on my system tried to call the tools,, and using the APPLE RESOURCE at the address I shared got things back to behaving as expected for me.


I didn’t attempt to lay blame for the issue—identifying that is not my domain. I shared what worked for me—if it doesn’t solve their issue, it doesn’t solve their issue, Either way, getting defensive over my comment certainly doesn’t make it feel very COMMUNITY-like here.


Hope you have a great day.

Oct 29, 2022 2:17 PM in response to eshton184

eshton184 wrote:

getting defensive over my comment certainly doesn’t make it feel very COMMUNITY-like here.

These kinds of questions are very frustrating. This is a user-to-user support forum for users of Apple products. But aside from the Command Line Tools and Xcode, everything that everyone here is using is 3rd party: VS, Python, MacPorts, and, of course, Homebrew. Xcode works perfectly well. The Command Line Tools work perfectly well. The problem is always those 3rd party tools. Yet people come here and ask questions about those tools instead of asking the developers of said tools for support. But of course, all those tools are free, so they have no support - not even a dedicated user-to-user support forum. So people ask here, in a forum where people generally don't use any of those tools.

Oct 29, 2022 3:46 PM in response to etresoft

W the caveat that I’m not an advanced Apple techie, IN MY CASE, it seems the problem WAS w the tools—perhaps because a 3rd-party component corrupted mine or…? IMO, that, colloquially, translates to troubleshooting the tools. A clean install (in the vein of reinstalling an erratic app or OS) fixed it for me.


Altho I’ve no need such a robust tool, I self-verified that both Xcode and the tools work as expected provided an unaltered file set from Apple. Since I didn’t happen to see that someone else used the fix that worked for me, I posted it so the next person can skip the extra steps.


At your level the semantics of calling it a problem w the tools is blatantly incorrect. I understand your frustration at we less technical users misusing semantics, but it is regardless the way ppl (incl moderately technical me) might phrase it. You neither know me nor anything that shows I’m not in the “it’s Apple’s fault” wagon train. But I’m not, so there’s no need for defense nor frustration in this case.


Command Line Developer Tools

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