Mac OS – Solving can’t install Titanium CLI & Alloy (Invalid password)

Titanium is this thing, which allows for cross-OS mobile development. I recently had to compile an application written in Titanium for iOS. I’ll skip the highly weird “installation” method for Titanium (the installer itself unpacks some stuff and asks you to manually drag and drop it into the application folder). When running Titanium for the first time, it will try to update as well as to install dependencies. To do so, it will ask for your account password. And if you’re unlucky like me, your proper account password won’t work. The issue was reported there, but they only provided various workarounds which I don’t find very satisfying (notably due to their lack of simplicity).

First, a more accurate description: when your Mac gives you a password prompt, normally your name appears as “FirstName LastName”. In the case of this issue, my name would appear as my login, ie “lastnamefirstname”. I observed that on 3 machines: the 2 where the issue occurred had “lastnamefirstname”, the one where it worked had “FirstName LastName”. The accounts with or without the issue all apparently had full admin permissions (according to Apple → System Preference → Users & Groups).

Now, the solution for me was to set up the root password. That password isn’t set by default (or at least it’s unknown). And funny thing, this was just like setting the root password on any Linux distribution (I think I made a post about that for Ubuntu or Debian a while ago). Basically:
– open terminal (search “terminal”)
– type “sudo passwd”
– then enter your current (admin) user password, then enter the new root password (twice)
And voilà. On a side note, you can now use “su”. But more importantly, if you try to run those Titanium Updates/Additional package installs again, and enter the root password, it should work (NB: in my case, I chose the same password for both su and my admin user).