Authorize a non-admin developer in Xcode / Mac OS

Question

I use a standard user account for my daily tasks on Mac OS. Since upgrading to Snow Leopard I am asked to do the following when a program is run from within Xcode:

"Type the name and password of a user in the 'Developer Tools' group to allow Developer Tools Access to make changes"

While I know the admin username/password, this is annoying (though only required once per login).

The developer tools access is asking for rights to "system.privilege.taskport.debug" from application gdb-i386-apple-darwin.

What is the best way around this?

Answer 1

$ dseditgroup -o edit -u <adminusername> -t user -a <developerusername> _developer

Answer 2

You should add yourself to the Developer Tools group. The general syntax for adding a user to a group in OS X is as follows:

sudo dscl . append /Groups/<group> GroupMembership <username>

I believe the name for the DevTools group is _developer.

Answer 3

I am on Snow Leopard and this one didn't quite work for me. But the following procedure worked:

1. First added another account with admin privileges by ticking "Allow user to administer this computer" under Accounts, for example an account with username test
2. Logged into the test account
3. Launched Xcode, compiled and ran my iPhone project. All ok, no errors were thrown related to permissions
4. Logged out of the test account
5. Logged in with the another account having admin privileges
6. Took away the admin priviliges from the test account by removing the tick from "Allow user to administer this computer" under Accounts
7. Logged back into the test account
8. Deleted the iPhone project directory and again checked out from the repository (in my case svn)
9. Launched Xcode, compiled and ran the project. I didn't get any errors and the App ran well in the iPhone Simulator.

Answer 4

After you run:

sudo dscl . append /Groups/_developer GroupMembership <username>

per the answer above, you may still get prompted to enter in your own password:

We need authorization from an admin user to run the debugger. This will only happen once per login session.

What it really means is any _developer groupmember user so just your non-admin user/password will work here but to get rid of it completely (no prompts after a reboot) you'll also need to run:

sudo DevToolsSecurity -enable

(running it with sudo as an admin user/as root will make it so you can do it remotely without a gui password prompt)

Answer 5

For me, I found the suggestion in the following thread helped:

Stop "developer tools access needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue" alert

It suggested running the following command in the Terminal application:

sudo /usr/sbin/DevToolsSecurity --enable

Answer 6

Ned Deily's solution works perfectly fine, provided your user is allowed to sudo.

If he's not, you can su to an admin account, then use his dscl . append /Groups/_developer GroupMembership $user, where $user is the username.

However, I mistakenly thought it did not because I wrongly typed in the user's name in the command and it silently fails.

Therefore, after entering this command, you should proof-check it. This will check if $user is in $group, where the variables represent respectively the user name and the group name.

dsmemberutil checkmembership -U $user -G $group

This command will either print the message user is not a member of the group or user is a member of the group.