cocoapods - 'pod install' takes forever

Question

I was trying to update the existing pods with the pod install command, but it takes forever to run.

The verbose mode shows it was stuck at the following

Answer 1

Found an alternative way to download cocoapods is to download one of the snapshots available here. It is a bit old but the .bz2 compressed file was much faster to download. Once I had downloaded it, I copied it over to ~/.cocoapods/repos/ and then I unzipped it using bzip2 -dk *.bz2.

The unzipping took a while and once it was over, I changed the extension of the newly uncompressed file to .tar and did tar xvf *.tar to unzip that. This will show the list of files being created and will also take a while.

Finally when I ran pod repo list while inside the project folder, it showed the master folder had been added as a repo. Because I still kept getting an error that it was unable to find the specification for the pod I was looking for, I went to the master folder and did git fetch and then git merge. The git fetch took the longest, about an hour at 50 KB/s. I used fetch and merge instead of pull, as I was having issues with it, i.e. fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly. It is now up to date and I was able to get the pod I wanted.