Hello,
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/802443 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/servicemanagement/updating-helper-executables-from-earlier-versions-of-macos https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ServiceManagement/updating-your-app-package-installer-to-use-the-new-service-management-api#Run-the-sample-launch-agent
Read these.
Earlier we had a setup with SMJobBless, now we have migrated to SMAppService.
Everything is working fine, the new API seems easier to manage, but we are having issues with updating the daemon.
I was wondering, what is the right process for updating a daemon from app side?
What we are doing so far:
App asks daemon for version
If version is lower than expected:
daemon.unregister(), wait a second and daemon.register() again.
The why?
We have noticed that unregistering/registering multiple times, of same daemon, can cause the daemon to stop working as expected. The daemon toggle in Mac Settings -> Login Items & Extensions can be on or off, but the app can still pickup daemon running, but no daemon running in Activity monitor. Registration/unregistration can start failing and nothing helps to resolve this, only reseting with sfltool resetbtm and a restart seems to does the job. This is usually noticeable for test users, testing same daemon version with different app builds.
In production app, we also increase the bundle version of daemon in plist, in test apps we - don't.
I haven't found any sources of how the update of pre-bundled app daemon should work. Initial idea is register/unregister, but from what I have observed, this seems to mess up after multiple registrations. I have a theory, that sending the daemon a command to kill itself after app update, would load the latest daemon. Also, I haven't observed for daemon, with different build versions to update automatically.
What is the right way to update a daemon with SMAppService setup?
Thank you in advance.