PhotoStructure for Servers - Command Line Tools - "Cannot determine appData" error

Support
1

I installed PhotoStructure for Servers v0.9.1 on a Ubuntu 20.04 VM, following the instructions for node, and when trying any of the command line tools, i’m getting a “Cannot determine appData” error. Full stack trace below for running one of the commands (for example, info):

#> ./photostructure info
Failed  Error: Cannot determine appData¹
    at a.thunk (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:902)
    at apply (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:454609)
    at Object.t.defaultLogDir (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:63344)
    at defaultValue (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:324225)
    at Object.t.tot (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:472259)
    at t.StringSetting.get defaultValue [as defaultValue] (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:315302)
    at t.StringSetting.get valueOrDefault [as valueOrDefault] (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:315519)
    at Object.t.setupLogger (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:64316)
    at Object.g [as setServiceName] (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:86063)
    at new t.CLI (/home/photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/bin/info.js:3:498342)

Any ideas, perhaps something i’ve not configured correctly? The web UI has been running fine, and it appears to have synced at least a few times, but there were some images from earlier this month that hadn’t yet synced so I was going to look into the logs to see when things last ran and came upon this.

Thanks in advance for the help!

2

Did you try to run start.sh first? It installs all the missing dependencies and the issue you are having won’t appear.

5

This error will show up if PhotoStructure can’t determine your “app data” directory.

On Windows, this defaults to PS_CONFIG_DIR or %APPDATA% (typically ~/AppData/Roaming)

On macOS, this is PS_CONFIG_DIR or ~/Library/Application Support.

On Linux, PhotoStructure looks at PS_CONFIG_DIR, XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME, and then defaults to ~/.config.

From this list of directories:

  1. PhotoStructure returns the first path that is already a directory.

  2. If no paths are directories, it returns the first path that it can create.

  3. If it can’t create any directories, it throws this error.

So: I suspect your user permissions are wonky: you may want to check the ownership of ~/.config. It may be owned by root, or is a file.

The simplest solution would be to make ~/.config a directory that is owned by your user. Many other apps will have issues if this isn’t a writable directory: it’s not just PhotoStructure.

If you don’t like that solution, and want PhotoStructure to use a different configuration directory, say, ~/.photostructure, add this to your .bashrc or .bash_login:

export PS_CONFIG_DIR="$HOME/.photostructure"

and then run

mkdir -p $HOME/.photostructure

Holler if this doesn’t fix it!

(Also, sorry that this topic was unlisted and then listed: I was on mobile and a bad tap clicked the wrong thing)

6

Thanks Matthew! That makes sense.

In case others run into this issue - I was logged in to the console for this VM as root and running the command. I tried changing to ~/.config and it (/root/.config/) didn’t exist, so that was why photostructure couldn’t find it. I suspect that it would still not work if /root/.config/ existed and wasn’t owned by the photostructure user.

If I login as the photostructure user I created:
sudo --login --user photostructure bash
…and then run ./photostructure info it works just fine. So is this ./photostructure command trying to run as the photostructure user or just the logged in user (I guess logged in)?

1 Like
7

No: PhotoStructure doesn’t do any user shenanigans. It just runs as the user that runs it.