pkg?Ī few hours later, it worked! And I shipped it last night. I don't really have say over what VirtualBox is doing and what macOS allows, but what if I took control of the process and did everything myself by wrapping their. To be clear: it's an incredibly dumb, hack of a solution, but it works.Īnd like nearly all of my best ideas, it came from talking things over with a friend.
#VIRTUALHOSTX NOT WORKING UPDATE#
So with this week's release of VirtualHostX Pro being the biggest update in the app's twelve year history, I decided to revisit the problem. So, over the years I've done the best I could by writing step by step, illustrated support documents as well as sending out Getting Started drip email campaigns to new customers with explicit instructions. And I'm scared to think about how many simply never email and give me the opportunity to guide them through the process. In any case, I get a boat load of support requests from new customers wondering why my app isn't working. pkg files or kernel extensions (now that they require a specifically approved Developer ID account to distribute), to know for sure if this blame is on VirtualBox for not installing the kext the correct way, or if this really is Apple's chosen flow for installing and approving extensions.
#VIRTUALHOSTX NOT WORKING MAC#
I (speaking as a fairly well-experienced Mac developer) don't know enough about. So that's what my app is dealing with when I try and onboard a new customer.
![virtualhostx not working virtualhostx not working](https://itlasopa174.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/7/6/127615316/531560290.jpg)
So if you miss the initial prompt and aren't enough of a techie to know what you need to do to proceed, well. If, however, you're a saavy enough user to think to try and run the installer a second, third, fourth, fifth time, it will continue to fail - but will never again prompt you to approve the extension. The first time you run the installer, to macOS's credit, the system at least does display the prompt to open Security Preferences. To be clear: the installer will fail, 100% of the time, on a clean copy of macOS before the user has the opportunity to approve or deny the kext.īut here's where it gets insidious.
![virtualhostx not working virtualhostx not working](https://cdn.tyler.io/wp-content/uploads/blog/pricing-vhx.jpg)
Like many of my non-technical users - or folks who are just in a hurry or don't pay close enough attention - I chose to click "OK" in the video.īut no matter what choice I pick, before I can even make a choice, the installation fails because the kernel extension was initially blocked. If you don't have JavaScript enabled, you canĪs expected, macOS blocks the installation of the new 3rd party kernel extension and instead prompts the user to either open Security Preferences or pick the default option, which is to do nothing. Watch this video of me running the VirtualBox installer a few times in a row.
![virtualhostx not working virtualhostx not working](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Xr0j.png)
We can debate the merits of Apple's tightening down of macOS in recent years, but that's not the point of this blog post. And with Apple's security decision to crackdown on 3rd party kernel extensions, it's made onboarding new customers - especially non-technical ones - a nightmare.
#VIRTUALHOSTX NOT WORKING INSTALL#
Specifically, its requirement to install a kernel extension on users' machines. In talking with customers and looking at the little in-app analytics data I do collect, I'm fairly confident in the reason.
![virtualhostx not working virtualhostx not working](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Mwr70FWqPHE/maxresdefault.jpg)
(The technical reasons for making that change are explained in this blog post.) If you look at a chart of new customers per month from August 2007 through November 2019, you can see there was a huge sea change trending downwards after I moved away from working with Apple's built-in web server, to managing my own inside a virtual machine with VirtualBox. And after twelve years and 50,000 customers, I'm incredibly lucky to have a passionate user base who are invested in seeing the app thrive. My most popular Mac app - and also the first app I built and brought to market way back in 2007 - is VirtualHostX.