How do I Install Xcode 6 or 7 on an external drive?

Question

The capacity of my SSD is just 60Gb, and I have just over 5Gb of free space at the moment. Is there a way to install Xcode directly on the external drive? Or to do so I'd have first to make this drive bootable and boot my system from it?

Answer 1

There are various possible solutions, including, making use of symlinks, dual booting two versions of macOS (one on external SSD), and many more.

But the best way I found was to create a new macOS user and change its home directory to external SSD (by going to advanced user settings under Users & Groups System Preferences).

The exact steps I followed:

1. Create a new APFS partition on external SSD with 100GB storage. (say NewVol)

2. Create new macOS user and change its home directory to /Volume/NewVol/user

3. Logged into the new user with external SSD connected, and installed xcode in ~/Application. (i.e. the local Application folder, not /Application)

Why this works best is because you don't need to manually manage symlinks, also symlinks might create problems during builds. All the required files (including builds and temporary files) are stored in user directory, so no space occupied on internal drive. Also, no hassle of installing a complete separate OS, and going through cycles of reboots to switch the OS.