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Troubleshooting

An assortment of troubleshooting tips.

The wails command appears to be missing?​

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 screen​

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 all:frontend/dist
var assets embed.FS

Check that frontend/dist contains your application assets.

Mac​

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 valid​

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.

My application is not displaying the correct icon in Windows Explorer​

If your application is not displaying the correct icon, try deleting the hidden IconCache.db file located in the C:\Users\&#060;your username&#062;\AppData\Local directory. This will force Windows to rebuild the icon cache.

Source: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/2360#issuecomment-1556070036

Cannot call backend method from frontend with variadic arguments​

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 Wails​

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 types​

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 frontend​

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 dev​

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 errors​

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.

If reinstalling Xcode Command Tools still fails, you can check the path where the toolkit is located using:

xcode-select -p

If /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer is displayed, run sudo xcode-select --switch /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

Sources: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/1806 and https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/issues/1140#issuecomment-1290446496

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Cannot start service: Host version "x.x.x does not match binary version "x.x.x"​

It's preferable to add frontend/node_modules and frontend/package-lock.json to your .gitignore. Otherwise when opening your repository on another machine that may have different versions of Node installed, you may not be able to run your application.

If this does happen, simply delete frontend/node_modules and frontend/package-lock.json and run your wails build or wails dev command again.

Build process stuck on "Generating bindings"​

Bindings generation process runs your application in a special mode. If application, intentionally or unintentionally, contains an endless loop (i.e. not exiting after wails.Run() finished), this can lead to build process stuck on the stage of bindings generation. Please make sure your code exits properly.

Mac application flashes white at startup​

This is due to the default background of the webview being white. If you want to use the window background colour instead, you can make the webview background transparent using the following config:

    err := wails.Run(&options.App{
        Title:  "macflash",
        Width:  1024,
        Height: 768,
        // Other settings
        Mac: &mac.Options{
            WebviewIsTransparent: true,
        },
    })