Unwritable user applications directory on macOS about pwasforfirefox HOT 7 CLOSED

I've installed the extension on macOS and runtime, attempting to install any site using CLI:

This is normal (or at least "not unexpected") because you need to provide a direct URL to the website manifest if you want to install it from CLI (for example, firefoxpwa site install twitter.com/manifest.json). However, https://www.notion.so does not have a PWA manifest so you will have to install it from extension.

When I try installing site with extension, it result in another error:

And here is the real problem and I'm not completely sure why exactly it happens. Can you please check troubleshooting steps and provide full log file? Maybe it provides more details why it failed.

@TitanNano Can you please try to debug and fix this?

It seems the error happens here. Perhaps it could be related to change in Homebrew formula where I changed all paths to use unversioned paths (to fix #55), but I'm not sure why it would cause permission denied error.

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I've installed the extension on macOS and runtime, attempting to install any site using CLI:

This is normal (or at least "not unexpected") because you need to provide a direct URL to the website manifest if you want to install it from CLI (for example, firefoxpwa site install twitter.com/manifest.json). However, notion.so does not have a PWA manifest so you will have to install it from extension.

When I try installing site with extension, it result in another error:

And here is the real problem and I'm not completely sure why exactly it happens. Can you please check troubleshooting steps and provide full log file? Maybe it provides more details why it failed.

@TitanNano Can you please try to debug and fix this?

It seems the error happens here. Perhaps it could be related to change in Homebrew formula where I changed all paths to use unversioned paths (to fix #55), but I'm not sure why it would cause permission denied error.

new error:

$ firefoxpwa site install https://twitter.com/manifest.json  
16:15:00 [INFO] Installing the site
16:15:00 [INFO] Downloading the PWA manifest
16:15:01 [INFO] Parsing the PWA manifest
16:15:01 [INFO] Installing system integration
16:15:01 [ERROR] Failed to install system integration

Caused by:
    0: Failed to create application entry
    1: Failed to create application directory
    2: Permission denied (os error 13)

How to debug?

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Unfortunately, I don't know as I don't have much experience with macOS. It seems FirefoxPWA cannot create directory in ~/Applications/Site Name.app because it doesn't have permission to do that. But I think ~/Applications is a user-writable directory, so FirefoxPWA should have that permission...

You can check which permissions does ~/Applications have. I think you can write ls -al ~/Applications in Terminal, and check in the first line who is the owner (it should be something like drwxr-x--- 24 user user 4096 sep 13 18:57 . where user is your username).

If all permissions are correct, maybe the problem is that Homebrew executes programs as its own user, so directories::BaseDirs::new()?.home_dir() returns the wrong directory? I don't know how to check this (without editing and recompiling the program), and it still doesn't explain why writing failed.

Please also try to run sudo dtruss firefoxpwa site install https://twitter.com/manifest.json (or some other strace-like macOS program) to check all system calls that FirefoxPWA does. Note that this will probably output quite a lot of things, you you should probably save them to file using sudo dtruss firefoxpwa site install https://twitter.com/manifest.json > firefoxpwa-dtruss.log 2>&1 and upload that file.

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@filips123 yes looks like there is no permission for writing to ~/Applications which is really odd. By default, Homebrew always uses the current user, no superuser or dedicated Homebrew user.

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@TitanNano @filips123 The owner of ~/Applications is root:

$ ls -al ~|grep Applications
drwxr-xr-x     6 root  staff      192 Sep 14 09:55 Applications

I didn't know why，but I solved the problem by giving write permission to ~/Applications:

$ sudo chmod -R a+w ~/Applications

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@yangchuansheng this is very odd on macOS... ~/Applications should be owned by your user as it is inside your home directory.

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I'll close this issue as there's not much I can do with it. I don't know why this happened, but if someone has the same problem, try to set write permissions to ~/Applications directory:

$ sudo chmod -R a+w ~/Applications

If someone knows why this happens, please leave a comment and I'll try to fix it.

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