Cannot launch service

Found it.

I needed to add the working directory, since the service creates a local file upon start.

If the working directory isn't specified it defaults to a read-only folder (or at least one my user didn't have access to).

As I mentioned above, checking the logs is way, way, way more complicated this. Console can drive people insane. And I'm not exaggerating for effect here.

That is correct.

I found the following plist entries very helpful in solving this problem:

<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/tmp/error.log</string>
<key>StandardOutPath</key>
<string>/tmp/out.log</string>

That made it super easy to find what the problem was, resulting in adding the WorkingDirectory node, as already mentioned above.

Is it supposed to do that? Daemons are normally supposed to continuously run in the background. You specifically told launchd that it would behave that way with "KeepAlive". If your "KeepAlive" task is repeatedly quitting with an error code, then Launchd is going to stop running it because obviously there is a problem with it.

No, the application crashed due to missing access rights to write to the default working directory. Adding the specific node in the xml fixed that.

Maybe put away the shovel and take a higher-level point of view. What are you actually trying to accomplish? Are you writing a tool that runs 24x7 in the background? Or are you trying to do something else? Whatever you are trying to do, your configuration parameters should match the expected, and realized, behaviour. If not, launchd is going to assume there is a problem and stop the task.

Currently, I'm creating an installer application which will download the latest available version and run the required commands to install it. I already had that working on Linux and Windows, and now also on macOS.

The server application itself is just a dummy application - for now. I just wanted to get the installer baked into the CI/CD cycle right from the start, so it will be tried and tested once the actual server and client applications are ready to be release into the wild.

Thanks for your pointers above. Once you mentioned that checking logs on Mac was difficult, I began researching on how to do that, and that lead me to the solution of my problems.

I think I just made some headway regarding logs.

There is the app called Console which shows the launchd logs which are the ones I was looking for.

The log shows that the process exits with 1, and then is marked as inactive (because exiting within 10 seconds of launch).

I'll continue digging

etresoft wrote:

OK. The forum's automatic colour scheme and your unusual shell prompt made me think you were running a "server" tool to run the script. I guess "server" is just part of your prompt. Normally there is a "$" there to help prevent such confusion.

Otherwise, all of my other points still stand.

server is the current directory showing up in the Terminal. I must have accidentally deleted the % sign.

Also, launch daemons run in a significantly different environment from your user account.

How are you checking system and error logs? On a Mac, that alone is an order of magnitude more difficult than anything else you've mentioned so far.

It would be nice to know how they are different. I tried checking the logs and couldn't see anything that seemed helpful.

While Googling I found references to increasing the log level of the launchctl service management, but that didn't work on my Mac mini.

The application is built from Node JS, but it is a packaged standalone executable containing the Node executable.

I can run it from console simply with ./

eriknorman@Eriks-Mac-mini server ./caligo-ninja-server-0.6.1-darwin 
hey

The file was not downloaded via browser. I run an installer (again, an executable Node JS application) which fetches the file and writes it to disk using fs.write(). As mentioned above, I can run the executable without problems in the console and I didn't have to confirm anything.

Yes, I ran chmod +x after copying the file.

See output above:

ls -lt
total 92584
-rwxr-xr-x  1 eriknorman  wheel  47399568 Feb 13 13:15 caligo-ninja-server-0.6.1-darwin

The x is there.