watchman writes incorrect path to com.github.facebook.watchman.plist file when installing via brew

[kageiit]

When installing watchman via brew with

brew install watchman --HEAD, it writes

<string>/usr/local/Cellar/watchman/HEAD/libexec/bin/watchman</string> to the com.github.facebook.watchman.plist file

while in fact, the real location is something like

<string>/usr/local/Cellar/watchman/HEAD-39b814a/libexec/bin/watchman</string>

This leads to watchman hanging indefinitely on OSX with an error like

launchd checkin failed: No such process in the watchman logs

[wez]

The plist is generated using the path returned from _NSGetExecutablePath and is generated by watchman itself when it decides that it needs to spawn the server process. brew install doesn't do anything with the plist.

I'm not sure how things got in a bad state for you, but these steps might help get things in the right state:

1. launchctl unload path/to/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist
2. remove the plist file
3. watchman version

Can you try that and let us know how things go?

[kageiit]

What i did instead was uninstall the head version and installed 4.6.0.

Then i updated the plist to the correct patch and rebooted.

That seemed to have fixed it.

[wez]

OK, I'll close this out as I think it is a one-off. If it comes back, please re-open this and we can figure out what the trigger was!

[mihado]

I think I ran into the same issue. I upgraded watchman and running npm start in a react-native project hangs indefinitely. I ran watchman version and it hangs too.

It seems to be fixed with running launchtl unload, remote the plist, and then reinstall watchman

[wez]

Tracking the follow up for this in #358