Install fails with "Failed to copy app to /Users/(username)/Applications"

[mtorpey]

I recently deployed my app, and although 5 Mac users have been able to install it without problems, one encounters this:

This is on MacOS Sequoia 15.7.2, but I've seen a successful install on another laptop running the exact same OS version.

Does anyone have any information on what's going wrong here? Perhaps it's to do with the laptop configuration?

I'd like to offer more debugging information, but I'm not quite sure how to get it.

[shannah]

I've seen this when the app was already running. Was this the first time the app had been installed, or was it installed already?

If you have access to the machine, try the install and then open terminal and run

cat ~/.jdeploy/log/jdeploy-installer.log

That should output the log and tell us what failed.

[mtorpey]

The app has never been successfully installed, and I verified that there was only one jdeploy/FeedbackHelper process running.

Here's the output from that log file:

Found bundle 266M in local cache
Project: https://github.com/mtorpey/FeedbackHelper
Package: FeedbackHelper
Detected GitHub project, attempting direct download from GitHub releases
Attempting to download from GitHub release tag: v5.0
GitHub release not found at tag 'v5.0', trying next tag...
Attempting to download from GitHub release tag: 5.0
Successfully downloaded bundle from GitHub release: 5.0
Successfully downloaded bundle from GitHub releases
Looking up package info for: FeedbackHelper version: 5.0
Found version: 5.0
Installer theme is null
Setting up codesigning
shouldSign=false, shouldNotarize=false
app dir exists = true
Icon File: /var/folders/1v/fjy854b51lz8n6j_5x1c4m7r0000gq/T/jdeploy-installer-FeedbackHelper261366380451801174/bundles/mac-arm64/FeedbackHelper.app/Contents/icon.png
Processing the info plist
Processing the app.xml file
Removing extended attributes from /var/folders/1v/fjy854b51lz8n6j_5x1c4m7r0000gq/T/jdeploy-installer-FeedbackHelper261366380451801174/bundles/mac-arm64/FeedbackHelper.app
java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to copy app to /Users/gnck/Applications
at ca.weblite.jdeploy.installer.Main.install(Main.java:793)
at ca.weblite.jdeploy.installer.Main.lambda$onProceedWithInstallation$11(Main.java:636)
at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Not sure whether that's any help.

Thanks for responding to this so quickly, and for the great tool.

[shannah]

I wonder if it could be a permissions issue.

What is the output of ls -la /Users/gnck/Applications?

[mtorpey]

Here we are:

ls -la /Users/gnck/Applications
total 0
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 root staff 96 17 Nov 12:37 .
drwxr-x---+ 66 gnck staff 2112 8 Dec 15:11 ..
drwxrwxrwx@ 12 root staff 384 1 Dec 16:41 Navigation Updater

Is it the root owner of . that's causing problems?

[shannah]

Maybe. That does look conspicuous. In my own machines that directory is owned by my user account.

[mtorpey]

The user managed to solve this with sudo chown gnck /Users/gnck/Applications. I haven't found any other Mac users with a root-owned user application directory, and we think it might be from a long sequence of new systems importing from old systems.

I guess this could be closed, unless there's some action to be taken, like a more descriptive error message (maybe that's too much).

[shannah]

Thanks for the update