The RWPickFlavor.podspec specification does not validate - ios

Question

I'm learning by following this tutorial:
https://www.raywenderlich.com/5823-how-to-create-a-cocoapod-in-swift
And I'm stuck in the place where it says:
Using Your New CocoaPod
in the terminal I wrote:
cd ~/Documents/Libraries/RWPickFlavor
pod repo add RWPodSpecs https://github.com/user/RWPodSpecs.git
pod repo push RWPodSpecs RWPickFlavor.podspec
but I get a lot of errors:
[!] /usr/bin/git clone https://github.com/user/RWPodSpecs.git -- RWPodSpecs
fatal: destination path 'RWPodSpecs' already exists and is not an empty directory
and:
Validating spec
-> RWPickFlavor (0.1.0)
- NOTE | url: The URL (https://github.com/user/RWPickFlavor) is not reachable.
- ERROR | [iOS] unknown: Encountered an unknown error ([!] /usr/bin/git clone https://github.com/user/RWPickFlavor.git /var/folders/bw/h527d_4x6yb7rv3tdrldty1c0000gn/T/d20220525-6530-de485a --template= --single-branch --depth 1 --branch 0.1.0
Cloning into '/var/folders/bw/h527d_4x6yb7rv3tdrldty1c0000gn/T/d20220525-6530-de485a'...
warning: Could not find remote branch 0.1.0 to clone.
fatal: Remote branch 0.1.0 not found in upstream origin
) during validation.
[!] The `RWPickFlavor.podspec` specification does not validate.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I had this very issue and here is how I resolved it:
Verify you are in the ~/Documents/Libraries/RWPickFlavor directory before performing any commands in Terminal.
Verify that the contents of RWPickFlavor.podspec are correct. Mine was not and, if something is wrong, then it will not validate the Podspec.
I went ahead and deleted the remote repository on GitHub and then ran rm -rf .git (again, make sure you are in ~/Documents/Libraries/RWPickFlavor). This step might be excessive, but I figured I had missed something when pushing to GitHub and, since this was just an initial commit, I did not feel like it really harmed anything. Yes, I am aware this is not best practice with regards to version control.
I then went ahead and recreated the remote repository on GitHub.
With the remote repository once again available, I did the following:
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git tag 0.1.0
git branch -M main
git remote add origin https://github.com/user/RWPickFlavor.git
git push -u origin main --tags
pod repo push RWPodSpecs RWPickFlavor.podspec
Explanation: I think I/we might have forgotten the tag creation in the process and also forgot to include it in the push. Before I deleted the remote repo, I noticed that there was no tag and, even if I added a tag, the Podspec still would not validate.
Hope this is helpful.