Rive Native setup.dart not executed automatically during Xcode build

[Olomonso]

Description

Hi, I just installed the newest dev version of rive (0.14.0-dev.12). I used 0.13.20 before.
I experienced failing builds due to the rive_native setup.dart script not being automatically executed in the Xcode build step. The console gave me the following output:

[rive_native] Setup marker not found. Running setup script...
[rive_native] If this fails, make sure you have Dart installed and available in your PATH.
[rive_native] You can run the setup manually with:
dart run rive_native:setup --verbose --platform ios
[rive_native] Using dart from FLUTTER_ROOT: /Users/[MY_USER]/fvm/versions/3.32.7
Could not find a file named "pubspec.yaml" in "[PATH_TO_PROJECT_ROOT]/ios/Pods".

Note: I manually added the brackets to shorten the paths and keep relevant information. Especially the last line of the output is important.

I already read different issues here about people having similar problems and the solution to run the setup script manually. This indeed fixes the issue for my local environment but CI/CD jobs still fail and I didn't wanted to edit all build jobs to pre-run the setup script. So I tried tracking down the issue.

Steps To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Install rive version 0.14.0-dev.12 (internally uses rive_native version: 0.0.15)
2. Since the binaries are saved in the .pub-cache in the rive_native directory make sure to delete them first. I just cleaned the complete pub-cache for this: dart pub cache clean
3. Install project dependencies again: flutter pub get
4. Run the app or build it
5. Xcode build step will crash

Device & Versions

• Device: iOS Simulator & iOS Device
• OS: iOS 18.6
• Flutter Version:

Flutter 3.32.7 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision d7b523b356 (3 months ago) • 2025-07-15 17:03:46 -0700
Engine • revision 39d6d6e699 (3 months ago) • 2025-07-15 15:39:12 -0700
Tools • Dart 3.8.1 • DevTools 2.45.1

Potential fix

I tracked down the script which tries to run the setup.dart script of rive_native.
I ended up under the .pub-cache-directory in the installed rive_native-0.0.15 package directory and it's ios/rive_native.podspec.

I then modified the script to print the working directory before trying to execute the setup.dart using echo $(pwd). This gave me the hint that we're in the wrong directory for the execution of the setup script ([PATH_TO_PROJECT_ROOT]/ios/Pods). So I added the following before the setup.dart execution:

# [...]

# Check if current path contains ios/Pods before changing directory
if echo "$(pwd)" | grep -q "ios/Pods"; then
  cd ../..
fi

if [ -n "$FLUTTER_ROOT" ] && [ -x "$FLUTTER_ROOT/bin/dart" ]; then
  echo "[rive_native] Using dart from FLUTTER_ROOT: $FLUTTER_ROOT"
  "$FLUTTER_ROOT/bin/dart" run rive_native:setup --verbose --platform ios
else
  echo "[rive_native] FLUTTER_ROOT not set or dart not found in FLUTTER_ROOT. Using system dart..."
  dart run rive_native:setup --verbose --platform ios
fi

# [...]

After adding the check if we are in ios/Pods and navigate back to the project root directory the setup.dart was able to run automatically and download the binaries.

But this leads to another issue:

Error (Xcode): Build input file cannot be found: '[PATH_TO_PROJECT_ROOT]/ios/.symlinks/plugins/rive_native/native/build/iphoneos/bin/release/librive_native.a'. Did you forget to declare this file as an output of a script phase or custom build rule which produces it?

This error only occurs in the same build step the binaries are downloaded too. I assume this is a Xcode caching problem. In any future build attempts after the binaries were already downloaded the build succeeds. A fix for the second issue was still crucial for my CI/CD jobs to run so I ended up adding the librive_native.a files to the :output_files in the rive_native.podspec:

s.script_phases = [
  {
	:name => 'Rive Native Compile',
	:script => script,
	:execution_position => :before_compile,
	:output_files => [
	  '${PODS_TARGET_SRCROOT}/rive_marker_ios_setup_complete',
	  '$(PODS_TARGET_SRCROOT)/../native/build/iphoneos/bin/release/librive_native.a',
	  '$(PODS_TARGET_SRCROOT)/../native/build/iphoneos/bin/emulator/librive_native.a'
	]
  }
]

After adding these 2 lines I cleaned everything and reinstalled the dependencies. The build succeeded then on the first attempt.

[HayesGordon]

Thanks for the investigation @Olomonso, it sounds like we're just missing those two lib files. The marker file is supposed to only be created after the libs are available, so it is strange.

I'll investigate this more and add these lines too.

If you ever do run into an issue with the libs, note that you can manually trigger downloading/building them through the CLI, for example:

dart run rive_native:setup --verbose --clean --platform ios