🛠️ Troubleshooting

Find help for issues with Shorebird.

I created a patch, but it's not showing up in my app

There are several reasons this might be happening. Common causes are:

The app you're running on your device/emulator was not built using one of the shorebird release commands.

How to tell if this is the problem

You can check this by checking 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 device logs, run adb logcat in your terminal. You can filter the output to only show Flutter logs by running adb logcat | grep flutter.

How to fix it

Create a release using shorebird release android --artifact=apk commands and install the apk produced by that command on your device/emulator. When running this apk, you should see Shorebird logs in your device logs.

The patch was created for a different release version than the one running on your device/emulator.

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.

How to tell if this is the problem

You will see Shorebird updater: no active patch in your device logs.

How to fix it

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.

I installed Shorebird, and now I can't run my app in VS Code

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.

Could not find an option named "dart define" when using the -- separator

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=bar

Shorebird fails to install

There are a number of reasons this might happen. Common causes are:

I see a message saying that git stat failed because a file was too long

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 true

You may need to run this as an administrator, and you will need to restart your terminal after running this command.

My iOS build number increments when I try to make a release or patch

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 [https://github.com/shorebirdtech/shorebird/issues/318](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.otf
Continue 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 next section.

It is always good practice to test your patch with --staging and then use shorebird preview --staging to install the patch on your device. That way you can see your patch exactly as it will appear on user's devices where the "patch" will replace the Dart code, but not change the underlying native code or assets in the app.

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:

1. 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 my cause your patched app to crash.
2. 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.

If you are confident that the changes are safe, you can ignore this warning by passing the --force flag to shorebird patch.

"Invalid Podfile file: cannot load such file" when running pod install

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:

1. flutter clean, or
2. flutter build ios in your project's root directory, or
3. flutter run in your project's root directory and targeting an iOS simulator/device.

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