I began working on an iOS project that began as a simple subclass of a UITextField. But as requirements grew I kept adding subclasses of other UIControls to the project and decided that it would be appropriate to change the name of the project to something more generic.

With newer versions of Xcode, it is quite simple to rename your project. A mere (slow) double-click of the project within Xcode allows for the text of the project to be changed, after which a popup displays asking if you want additional parts of the project to be auto-renamed.

This works great, until you realize that your Pods are spitting out various compilation errors and you look back at your terminal to see the following CocoaPod warning (following a pod install):

[!] CocoaPods did not set the base configuration of your project because your project already has a custom config set. In order for CocoaPods integration to work at all, please either set the base configurations of the target MyApp to Pods/Target Support Files/Pods/Pods.debug.xcconfig or include the Pods/Target Support Files/Pods/Pods.debug.xcconfig in your build configuration.

What you want to do in this case is clear your botched rename attempt and try again by first running (for those with git) git reset --hard (WARNING: USE WITH CARE) to get back to your original project.

Now, this time, before renaming the project, we want to remove CocoaPods and its settings from our project. Don’t worry though! We are going to re-add CocoaPods back to your project before this is all over. The general procedure looks like:

1. remove CocoaPods
2. rename project
3. re-add CocoaPods to your project

First, install cocoapods-deintegrate, a handy tool that takes care of removing all CocoaPods settings from your project. Once installed, move to the directory containing your .xcodeproject file and run pod deintegrate. (Note: [!] A valid Xcode project file is required. will appear if you have multiple .xcodeproject or .xcworkspace files in the directory, so ensure that you have at most 1 copy of each.)

Once it finishes doing its thing, open the xcodeproject project, NOT the workspace (close the xcworkspace project if you have it open), and rename your project by slowly clicking the project name in the left pane.

Once renamed, close the project and change your Podfile’s target names (if needed). For instance, if you were renaming STATextField to STAControls, you would want to change this:

target 'STATextFieldTests', :exclusive => true do
  pod 'KIF', '~> 3.0'
end

to this:

target 'STAControlsTests', :exclusive => true do
  pod 'KIF', '~> 3.0'
end

Then run pod install. Be sure to trash the old .xcworkspace file, and open the newly created .xcworkspace file (the one CocoaPods tells you to use: [!] From now on use `STAControls.xcworkspace`.).

Now try building and running. It should work if you don’t have any tests in your project.

I unfortunately did have tests in my project and ended up with the following linker error:
ld: file not found: /Users/aaron/..../Build/Products/Debug-iphonesimulator/STATextField.app/STATextField

To fix this, I needed to update the value of BUNDLE_LOADER within Build Settings of my test target (STAControlsTests) from:

$(BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR)/STATextField.app/STATextField

to:

$(BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR)/STAControls.app/STAControls

And there you have it! A shiny new name for your project!