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:

\

Answer 1

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 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

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.

Answer 4

Answer suggested by @Stacy Simpson:

We are struggling with the issue described in these threads and none of the resolutions seem to work:

• Stop "developer tools access needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue" alert
• Authorize a non-admin developer in Xcode / Mac OS

As I'm new to SO, I cannot post in either thread. (The first one is actually closed and I disagree with the localization reasoning...)

Anyway, we created a work-around using AppleScript that folks may be interested in. The script below should be executed asynchronously prior to launching your automated test:

osascript <script name> <password> &

Here is the script:

on run argv
    # Delay for 10 seconds as this script runs asynchronously to the automation process and is kicked off first.
    delay 10

    # Inspect all running processes
    tell application "System Events"
        set ProcessList to name of every process
        # Determine if authentication is being requested
        if "SecurityAgent" is in ProcessList then
            # Bring this dialogue to the front
            tell application "SecurityAgent" to activate
            # Enter provided password
            keystroke item 1 of argv
            keystroke return
        end if
    end tell
end run

Probably not very secure, but it's the best work-around we've come up with to allow tests to run without requiring user intervention.

Hopefully, I can get enough points to post the answer; or, someone can unprotect this question. Regards.