tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance

Question

This is very much a duplicate of xcode-select active developer directory error except none of those solutions worked for me.

$ sudo xcode-select --reset
$ sudo xcodebuild -license accept                                  
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
$ sudo xcode-select --install
xcode-select: error: command line tools are already installed, use "Software Update" to install updates

I don't even have xcode on my machine.

Solution 1

I had "xcode-select active developer directory error" too when installing Xcode beta. In your case you don't even need full Xcode, command line tools should work fine. Read this Github issue

Solution 2

I had this problem because Xcode was installed in my user application directory (~/Applications) instead of /Applications. From the Github link above figured out I needed to run:

sudo xcode-select -s ~/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

(note the tilde). After this everything worked.