Troubleshooting
Find help for issues with Shorebird.
There are several reasons this might be happening. Start by running your release
on a device or Android emulator using the shorebird preview command to see the
log output.
Common causes of this problem are:
Patches are only compatible with the release version they were created for. If
you create a patch for version 1.0.0+1, it will not work on version 1.0.0+2.
You will see Shorebird updater: no active patch in your device logs.
Ensure that the version of your app on your device/emulator matches the version of the patch you created. You can see what release version your app is running by looking in the device logs for:
Sending patch check request: PatchCheckRequest { app_id: "<your app id>", channel: "stable", release_version: "1.0.3+16", <-- this is the release version patch_number: <some patch number>, platform: "android", arch: "aarch64"}Only patches created for this release version will be compatible with your app.
If you uploaded an .aab or .xcarchive created using shorebird build or
shorebird patch, it will not be patchable. You must upload the build
created by shorebird release.
You see Update rejected: hash mismatch in your device logs. Note: this is not
the only thing that can cause a hash mismatch error.
Unfortunately, you will need to create a new release using shorebird release.
The app you’re running on your device/emulator was not built using one of the shorebird release commands.
If you are running your app using shorebird preview, this is not the problem.
If you have installed the app on your device/emulator a different way, check
your device logs for output from Shorebird. If you don’t see anything like
Starting Shorebird update or Sending patch check request, you are not
running a Shorebird-built app.
To check your Android device logs, run adb logcat in your terminal. You can
filter the output to only show Flutter logs by running adb logcat | grep flutter.
Use shorebird preview.
If you see error output like the following when using the Run or Debug button in VS Code:
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* What went wrong:Execution failed for task ':app:checkDebugAarMetadata'.> Could not resolve all files for configuration ':app:debugRuntimeClasspath'. > Could not find io.flutter:arm64_v8a_debug:1.0.0-4a5e8142f3e7368a48e4f6151cb7b1a684d6dd83. Searched in the following locations:It’s possible that VS Code is incorrectly using Shorebird’s version of Flutter
instead of the Flutter on your path (see
https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues/4607). You can fix this by
explicitly providing VS Code with the path to your Flutter installation. In your
settings.json file, add the line:
"dart.flutterSdkPath": "/path/to/flutter"Where “/path/to/flutter” is the path to your Flutter installation. You can get
this by running which flutter in your terminal (or where.exe flutter on
Windows) and removing the /bin/flutter from the end of that path.
Powershell handles the -- separator differently than other shells (see
this StackOverflow answer for more
info). To work around this, you can quote the -- separator. For example:
shorebird release android '--' --dart-define=foo=barThere are a number of reasons this might happen. Common causes are:
This can happen on Windows due to Windows’ limit of 260 characters for a filename.
You can fix this by running:
git config --system core.longpaths trueYou may need to run this as an administrator, and you will need to restart your terminal after running this command.
This is likely because you are providing an export options .plist file that
sets manageAppVersionAndBuildNumber to true. This is incompatible with
Shorebird because Shorebird requires that you maintain control over your app’s
version and build numbers in order to target patches at specific releases. You
can fix this problem by either setting manageAppVersionAndBuildNumber to false
or removing the value from your export options .plist file.
I see a The release artifact contains asset changes warning when running shorebird release (#asset-changes)
The shorebird patch command will print a warning if it detects changes to
files in your compiled app that correspond to asset changes (e.g. added or
removed images, fonts, etc.). This does not always mean that your patch will not
work, but shorebird cannot be sure that the changes are safe.
Shorebird does not (yet) have the ability to patch assets but intends to add such in the future, at which time this warning may go away.
An example of this warning:
✓ Verifying patch can be applied to release (4.0s)[WARN] The release artifact contains asset changes, which will not be included in the patch. Added files: base/assets/flutter_assets/assets/images/bg_button_disable.png Changed files: base/assets/flutter_assets/AssetManifest.bin base/assets/flutter_assets/AssetManifest.json base/assets/flutter_assets/fonts/MaterialIcons-Regular.otfContinue anyways? (y/N)So what does this mean? In this case, it means I added a new image to my app. The warning is because my patched Dart code could depend on those new assets which will not be present when the patch is applied in the wild. It can be safe to ignore this kind of warning if you’re removing an asset that is not used by your code, or your Dart code knows how to handle the asset being missing.
Also included in the above changes are the AssetManifest files. These files
change any time you add or remove an asset from your app, and are generally
a symptom rather than the cause of the warning.
The final file changed above is the MaterialIcons-Regular.otf font file,
which can happen if your app uses more or fewer icons from the Dart code.
Flutter will automatically “tree shake” your fonts, so if you don’t use an icon
in your Dart code, it will not be included in the final app. You can
disable this behavior with --no-tree-shake-icons at the risk of increasing
your app size. This type of warning will also go away once we add
[https://github.com/shorebirdtech/shorebird/issues/318](asset patching).
A type of change not shown above is one which changes .dex files on Android or
the Runner.app directory on iOS. These changes represent changes to the
native code of your app, and are not patchable by Shorebird. If you see this
warning, you should be very careful about publishing your patch, as it may
cause your app to crash when the Dart code tries to call into native code
which operates differently than expected. See
The consequences of ignoring this warning depend on the changes that were made. In the tree-shaking example above, if you ignore the warning, your app will render incorrectly if you use an icon that was not included in the release build. Any assets introduced in a patch will fail to load and your app may crash if it depends on them.
If you are not sure whether your change is safe, you can stage your patch and test locally before deploying it to users.
I see a The release artifact contains native changes warning when running shorebird patch, even though I haven’t changed Swift/Objective-C/Kotlin/Java code
The shorebird patch command will print a warning if it detects changes to
files in your compiled app that correspond to native code changes (.dex files
on Android, files in the Runner.app directory on iOS). This does not always
mean that your patch will not work, but because shorebird cannot be sure that
the changes are safe, and because shorebird can’t patch non-Dart code, it prints
a warning.
This can be caused by a number of things. The most common causes are:
- A dependency/plugin you are using has changed its native code. You should use caution when publishing patches that include changes to native code from plugins. In the worst case, these changes may cause your patched app to crash.
- A dependency/plugin produces a different output on every build. This can happen if the dependency it includes a timestamp indicating when it was built, for example. This kind of change is usually safe to publish, but you should be sure this is the only reason you are seeing this warning.
- (iOS only) The release was built with a different version of Xcode than the patch. This can be fixed by ensuring that you are using the same version of Xcode to build the release and the patch. If you’ve upgraded to a newer version of Xcode since building the release, you can download older versions of Xcode from Apple’s developer downloads page.
- (iOS only) You are building with an old version of Xcode. Specifically, we’ve seen this warning when building with Xcode 14.1. If you are using a version of Xcode that is not the latest, try upgrading to the latest version.
If the changes are to native code that interacts with your Flutter app or with Flutter itself, your app will crash. If the native code that changed does not interact with your Dart code or Flutter at all, the patch should run without issue.
If you are not sure whether your change is safe, you can stage your patch and test locally before deploying it to users.
You might see this error message if the FLUTTER_ROOT definition in your
project’s ios/Flutter/Generated.xcconfig points to a Shorebird Flutter
installation. This can be fixed by running any of:
flutter clean, orflutter build iosin your project’s root directory, orflutter runin your project’s root directory and targeting an iOS simulator/device.
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