Improve installation reliability and reduce common setup friction

[KevinQuisquater]

Hi everyone,

Over the years I have repeatedly heard developers say that they tried to install fastlane, ran into issues during setup, and eventually gave up. I had the same experience myself on my first attempt. I only succeeded later by discovering a couple of undocumented workarounds.

Today I spoke with another developer who had abandoned the idea of using fastlane years ago because of installation problems, which made me realize that these issues are probably causing real attrition. I am sharing them here in the hope that the documentation or the tooling itself can be improved so more users successfully complete their first setup.

I do not feel confident submitting a PR because what follows are workarounds rather than clean solutions. My goal is simply to highlight points of friction that likely affect many first time users.

1) fastlane init appears to hang unless run with sudo

When running the documented command:

fastlane init

the process gets stuck indefinitely on:

Installing dependencies for you... bundle update

For many users this looks like fastlane is broken. In practice, running:

sudo fastlane init

allows the process to complete.

I understand why recommending sudo is undesirable. If that is not acceptable, it would be great to either:

• Make fastlane fail clearly instead of hanging, or
• Ensure the default command works without elevated privileges, or
• Document a safer alternative that avoids this issue.

Right now the silent hang is extremely confusing for new users.

2) Manual Finder permission changes are required after manual setup

After running fastlane init, selecting option 4 (Manual setup), and pressing enter three times to go through the installation process, fastlane still will not work unless file permissions are manually adjusted in Finder.

Specifically:

• Open the Appfile in Finder, press cmd+i, and add your own user with Read & Write permissions in Sharing & Permissions.
• Repeat the same change for the Fastfile.
• In some cases, the parent folder permissions also need to be updated.

Without these changes, fastlane fails, and nothing in the documentation warns users about this step.

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These two issues alone have been enough to unblock everyone I have helped install fastlane.

This might seem minor, but installation is the very first experience users have with the tool. Even small friction here can easily cause a significant percentage of potential users to drop off before ever trying fastlane, which is a real loss for the project.

Thanks for considering this feedback.