CocoaPods and Ruby Compatibility Issues with Flutter 2.6 on M1 Mac (Pod Install Fails)

I have a Flutter project from 2021 that I need to rebuild without upgrading dependencies. To manage different Flutter versions, I installed FVM and switched to Flutter 2.6 to build for iOS.

However, when I try to run pod install in the ios directory, I encounter the following error:

[!] Invalid `Podfile` file: undefined method `exists?' for class `File`.

My Current Environment:

• Mac: M1 (Apple Silicon) with Rosetta enabled
• Flutter: 2.6 (using FVM)
• Ruby: 3.3.6 (default system Ruby)
• CocoaPods: 1.11.3 (installed via sudo gem install cocoapods -v 1.11.3)

Questions:

1. How can I successfully install Ruby 2.7.5 on my M1 Mac given that OpenSSL 1.1 is deprecated in Homebrew?
2. Is there a workaround to make CocoaPods 1.11.3 work with Ruby 3.3.6?
3. How can I resolve the undefined method 'exists?' for class 'File' error during pod install?
4. Is there any hope that I can run that project without having to dig deep in that wormhole of a codebase?

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

What I Have Tried:

1. Reinstalling Everything:
   I reinstalled Flutter, FVM, Ruby, and CocoaPods.

2. Switching to Ruby 2.7.5:
   I know CocoaPods 1.11.3 is compatible with Ruby 2.7.x, so I tried to install Ruby 2.7.5 using rbenv:

   rbenv install 2.7.5

   However, the installation fails with errors related to OpenSSL. I get messages like:

   Error: openssl@1.1 has been disabled because it is not supported upstream! It was disabled on 2024-10-24.

3. Attempted Fixes for rbenv:

   • Installed dependencies using Homebrew:

     arch -arm64 brew install openssl@1.1 readline libyaml gmp zlib

   • Tried various environment configurations:

     export RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-openssl-dir=$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)"

   • Attempted to install using Rosetta:

     arch -x86_64 rbenv install 2.7.5

4. Cleaning and Reinstalling CocoaPods:

   sudo gem uninstall cocoapodssudo gem install cocoapods -v 1.11.3

5. Cleaning Pods:

   pod deintegratepod cache clean --allrm Podfile Podfile.lockpod install