portable path for macOS

[chriseomi]

Now that portability is a solid feature for Windows and Linux. Would it be possible to implement portable data path for macOS users too?

Wire.app seems to currently use either the ~/Library/Containers/com.wearezeta.zclient.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Wire folder or the ~/Library/Application Support/Wire folder. Which one may depend on the type of macOS build used (MAS/dmg), though I'm not sure

[ekkis]

there's a databases/Databases.db file in there that I can open with SqlLite but seems empty. where are the conversations kept?

[chriseomi]

Not sure. Wire Desktop is an electron app, so maybe Chromium localstorage (wherever that is)?

[ffflorian]

@chriseomi did you try starting /Applications/Wire.app/Contents/macOS/Wire --portable? With this command, Wire should save your data in the folder you are running it from.

[chriseomi]

@chriseomi did you try starting /Applications/Wire.app/Contents/macOS/Wire --portable? With this command, Wire should save your data in the folder you are running it from.

Thanks, I'm testing this out currently and will report back.

[chriseomi]

@chriseomi did you try starting /Applications/Wire.app/Contents/macOS/Wire --portable? With this command, Wire should save your data in the folder you are running it from.

So this was quite helpful. However one caveat, is that it appears to always use the folder Wire.app/Contents/macOS/Data and not the working directory.

As a result the log file goes nuts saying it doesn't have permissions to do things. Which makes sense cos it's mixing the Data directory into App bundle.

Also wasn't able to run it as root.

Am getting this error

zsh: illegal hardware instruction sudo ./Wire --enable-logging --portable

[chriseomi]

I can 100% confirm using --portable on macOS means it will use /Applications/Wire.app/Contents/MacOS/Data

As evidenced in the log.

@wireapp/desktop/main [2021-10-26 23:04:50] Saving user data to "/Applications/Wire.app/Contents/MacOS/Data".

This is despite me launching Wire.app from the commandline whilst in the folder '~/tmp`

[chriseomi]

Additionally I tried using the --user_data_dir="/Volumes/xxxx/tmp/Data" argument.

This does work.. sort of. However the logging reveals the app is not able to access the folder throwing errors like this

[57875:1027/001814.640569:INFO:CONSOLE(69)] "Uncaught (in promise) Error: EPERM: operation not permitted, open '/Volumes/xxxx/tmp/Data/logs/electron.log'"

Googling this I though maybe it's a sandbox thing in macOS. And I added Wire.app to Full Disk Access. But that didn't seem to help.

Has anyone else ever managed to successfully run an alternative data folder on macOS?