Pod install is staying on "Setting up CocoaPods Master repo"

pod install or pod setup fetches whole repo with history when you first time run it. You don't need that commit history.

pod setup
Ctrl +C
cd ~/.cocoapods/repos 
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git master

It takes around 2 mins on decent network connection (4Mbps). master directory is around 519M big.

You could try running in verbose mode:

pod install --verbose

That'll show you what cocoa pods are up to:

Setting up CocoaPods master repo

Cloning spec repo `master` from `https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git` (branch `master`)
  $ /usr/bin/git clone 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git' master
  Cloning into 'master'...

(as suggested here)

For me the above step took quite a long time as the repo (Dec 2016) is now 1.1 GB