Sharing Files and Folders Between User Accounts on a Mac: How to Share Xcode Projects and Other Resources Between Your Work and Personal Accounts

Are you tired of constantly switching between different user accounts on your Mac just to access your Xcode projects? Do you wish there was an easier way to share projects among different users while still maintaining secure access control? Look no further! By utilizing groups and Access Control Lists (ACL), you can effortlessly share your Xcode projects between multiple users on your Mac.

In this post, we’ll walk you through the steps of setting up group permissions and using ACL to share Xcode projects between user accounts, saving you time and enhancing your development workflow.

A group is simply a collection of users within a system. Just like you can give permissions to individual users, you can also give them to a group. By allowing a group to access a certain resource (for example our Xcode project), you’re actually giving access to every user in that group as well.

Here are the steps to create a new group and grant the group access to an Xcode project:

Open the Terminal application on your Mac. You can find it in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder or by searching for “Terminal” in Spotlight.
To create a new group, use the following command:

sudo dscl . -create /Groups/SharedFolderGroup

Replace “SharedFolderGroup” with the name you want to give the new group.

Next, you’ll need to set the group’s ID number. This can be any number that isn’t already in use by another group. Use the following command to set the ID number to 1000:

sudo dscl . -create /Groups/SharedFolderGroup PrimaryGroupID 1000

Add users to the group using the following command:

sudo dscl . -append /Groups/SharedFolderGroup GroupMembership <username>

Replace <username> with the actual username of the user you want to add to the group. You can add multiple users to the group by repeating this command with each username.

Set Access Permissions for Xcode Project: Enabling Group Access

The command below will add an access control entry (ACE) to the folder or file that grants read, write, and execute permissions to the SharedFolderGroup. This means that any user who is a member of the SharedFolderGroup will have read and write access to the folder or file.

sudo chmod -R +a "group:SharedFolderGroup allow delete,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,list,search,add_file,add_subdirectory,delete_child,file_inherit,directory_inherit" /path/to/folder

Replace “/path/to/folder” with the path to the folder or file you want to share. For example, your Xcode project folder.

If you encounter any issues with permissions, make sure that your group has full access to the files and folders and that both your work and personal accounts are members of the group.

Now, you can open your Xcode project from another account, as long as the user in that account has been added to the SharedFolderGroup

Throughout this post, I’ve gathered insights and information from several valuable resources. I’d like to acknowledge and recommend these sources for further reading:

Macworld Hint - This post on the Macworld forum provides a helpful tip for sharing files and folders between user accounts on a Mac using ACL.
Moodle Installation Guide - Step 5 was derived from this resource, which provided the command to set the access control list for the user/group to allow read, delete, write, append, file, and directory inherit privileges on the specified directory and its contents.
Apple Support Guide - Apple’s official support page provides an in-depth look at managing user accounts, groups, and permissions on a Mac.
Access-control List on Wikipedia - For a deeper understanding of access control lists, this Wikipedia entry offers a detailed overview.

Feel free to explore these resources to expand your knowledge and further enhance your skills in managing user accounts and permissions on macOS.