Xcode fails building archive “fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything Illegal version”

Question

In Xcode 10.2, when I build a project to run on the Simulator, it works just fine. But when I click Product -> Archive, it fails with the unhelpful message

fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything
Illegal version:
Command PhaseScriptExecution failed with a nonzero exit code

What is the actual problem here? I've tried the lock & unlock trick with Keychain Access , deleting the DerivedData folder, and restarting the computer, but nothing has worked.

Answer 1

It turns out that in Build Phases I had a Run Script which was calling git describe to generate a version number, and that was raising the error message "fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything".

When I deleted the Run Script's call to git describe , it worked fine.