Project ...xcodeproj cannot be opened because it is missing its project.pbxproj file

Question

I was trying to merge branches and it resulted in the error "Unable to open project… cannot be opened because the project file cannot be parsed". I then tried to take the advice of other stackoverflow responses (namely to edit the file to remove the corruption), but was unable to edit the file. It appears that this is actually a directory, so maybe the structure of this changed with version 4.4 of xcode and since the response to Unable to open project... cannot be opened because the project file cannot be parsed was written.

I then tried to restore myProject.xcodeproj from my time machine backup. This does not work because it says that I don't have permission to access myProject.xcodeproj. I tried to change the permission of that directory, but that did not help.

I closed and reopened xcode. Now the error is:

Project ...xcodeproj cannot be opened because it is missing its project.pbxproj file.

How can I fix this problem in xcode version 4.4? Can it be restored from the previous snapshot or archive or version in xcode. Can it be restored with time machine. I would like to avoid rebuilding the entire project.

Answer 1

The simplest thing to do is probably to

1. Checkout myProject.xcodeproj from source control. This will contain the changes that were causing you to be in conflict last time.
2. Redo the project changes that you made since the last time you committed to source control
3. commit/push to source control.

In the future, when you get a conflict in the project file, take a look at myProject.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj. Often it's just new files in the project that have been added at the same place. In this case you just need to delete the conflict metadata and resolve the conflicted state.