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Troubleshooting

An assortment of troubleshooting tips.

The wails command appears to be missing?โ€‹

If your system is reporting that the wails command is missing, make sure you have followed the Go installation guide correctly. Normally, it means that the go/bin directory in your User's home directory is not in the PATH environment variable. You will also normally need to close and reopen any open command prompts so that changes to the environment made by the installer are reflected at the command prompt.

My application is displaying a white/blank screenโ€‹

Check that your application includes the assets from the correct directory. In your main.go file, you will have something similar to the following code:

//go:embed frontend/dist
var assets embed.FS

Check that frontend/dist contains your application assets.

Macโ€‹

If this happens on Mac, try adding the following to your Info.plist:

<key>NSAppTransportSecurity</key>
<dict>
    <key>NSAllowsLocalNetworking</key>
    <true/>
</dict>

Reference: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/1504#issuecomment-1174317433

Mac application not validโ€‹

If your built application looks like this in finder:

it's likely that your application's info.plist is invalid. Update the file in build/<yourapp>.app/Contents/info.plist and check if the data is valid, EG check the binary name is correct. To persist the changes, copy the file back to the build/darwin directory.

Cannot call backend method from frontend with variadic argumentsโ€‹

If you have a backend method defined with variadic parameters, eg:

func (a *App) TestFunc(msg string, args ...interface{}) error {
    // Code
}

calling this method from the frontend like this will fail:

var msg = "Hello: ";
var args = ["Go", "JS"];
window.go.main.App.TestFunc(msg, ...args)
  .then((result) => {
    //do things here
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    //handle error
  });

Workaround:

var msg = "Hello ";
var args = ["Go", "JS"];
window.go.main.App.TestFunc(msg, args)
  .then((result) => {
    //without the 3 dots
    //do things here
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    //handle error
  });

Credit: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/1186

I'm having getting proxy errors when trying to install Wailsโ€‹

If you are getting errors like this:

"https://proxy.golang.org/github.com/wailsapp/wails/cmd/wails/@v/list": dial tcp 172.217.163.49:443: connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

it's probably because the official Go Proxy is being blocked (Users in China have reported this). The solution is to set up the proxy manually, eg:

go env -w GO111MODULE=on
go env -w GOPROXY=https://goproxy.cn,direct

Source: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/1233

The generated Typescript doesn't have the correct typesโ€‹

Sometimes the generated Typescript doesn't have the correct types. To mitigate this, it is possible to specify what types should be generated using the ts_type struct tag. For more details, please read this.

When I navigate away from index.html, I am unable to call methods on the frontendโ€‹

If you navigate away from index.html to a new html file, the context will be lost. This can be fixed by adding the following imports to the <head> section of any new page you navigate to:

<head>
  <script src="/wails/ipc.js"></script>
  <script src="/wails/runtime.js"></script>
</head>

Source: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/discussions/1512

I get too many open files errors on my Mac when I run wails devโ€‹

By default, macOS will only allow you to open a maximum of 256 files. This can affect the wails dev command. This limit can be increased by running: ulimit -n 1024 in the terminal.

FSNotify is looking to move to Apple's fsevents for Mac. If this isn't completed soon, we will create our own implementation, tracked here.

My Mac app gives me weird compilation errorsโ€‹

A few users have reported seeing compilation errors such as the following:

# github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/internal/frontend/desktop/darwin
In file included from ../../pkg/mod/github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2@v2.0.0-beta.44.2/internal/frontend/desktop/darwin/callbacks.go:9:
In file included from /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/Foundation.h:12:
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSBundle.h:91:143: error: function does not return NSString
- (NSAttributedString *)localizedAttributedStringForKey:(NSString *)key value:(nullable NSString *)value table:(nullable NSString *)tableName NS_FORMAT_ARGUMENT(1) NS_REFINED_FOR_SWIFT API_AVAILABLE(macos(12.0), ios(15.0), watchos(8.0), tvos(15.0));
                                                         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                                                                       ^                  ~
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObjCRuntime.h:103:48: note: expanded from macro 'NS_FORMAT_ARGUMENT'
        #define NS_FORMAT_ARGUMENT(A) __attribute__ ((format_arg(A)))

This is normally due to a mismatch with the OS version you are running and the version of the XCode Command Line Tools installed. If you see an error like this, try upgrading your XCode Command Line Tools to the latest version.

Source: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/1806