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Troubleshooting

Sandboxed execution is a requirement across macOS, Windows, and Linux for distribution through official app marketplaces, where confinement is typically a prerequisite for approval. AppBundler supports sandboxing for all three bundle formats — MSIX, Snap, and DMG. Sandbox support for Julia applications is not yet fully resolved: MSIX and Snap both have known open issues, while DMG sandboxing has a working solution.

Each format implements isolation through its own mechanism, requiring format-specific configuration. Currently, macOS sandboxing is functional via the workaround described below; Snap confinement is limited to GTK applications; and MSIX sandboxing is non-functional for Julia applications due to a dependency on the legacy msvcrt32.dll runtime, which is incompatible with the UWP execution model.

To facilitate debugging, bundle compression can be disabled via the --debug flag. This also enables a console window through which stdout/stderr output is surfaced.

Snap (Linux)

To debug Snap packages, skip compression and install the staging directory directly. Optionally, inspect the sandbox environment of the installed application:

snap try myapp_dir       # install unpackaged directory
snap run --shell myapp   # inspect sandbox environment interactively

DMG (macOS)

  • com.apple.coreservices.launchservicesd must be whitelisted as a sandbox exception; the underlying reason is not yet understood.
  • Notarization is required for macOS distribution and can be performed with rcodesign.
  • Deep signing (dmg_shallow_signing=false) may intermittently fail; if so, clean the staging directory and retry. For custom cleanup logic, use the public API as described in Reference.
  • Notarization may fail due to an incompatible directory structure or unsigned artifacts; this has not yet been fully investigated.

To debug DMG bundles, skip the compression step. Note that the staging directory must carry a .app extension for macOS to treat it as an application bundle.

MSIX (Windows)

  • GTK applications fail to resolve shared libraries within the UWP execution environment. This is expected to be resolved once Julia migrates to the ucrt.dll runtime.
  • Only the packagedClassicApp execution mode is supported due to Julia's msvcrt32.dll dependency. This constraint will be lifted once Julia transitions to ucrt.dll.

To debug MSIX packages, skip compression and register the manifest from the staging directory directly:

Add-AppPackage -register AppxManifest.xml