CEP Mac Extensions refuse to load. Desperate to deploy self-made script ecosystem with my coworker.

[Matt_Franks]

I've got a bunch of scripts I made for work to make our lives easier.  Most repetitive, annoying tasks that my coworker and I face daily have been eliminated, and I'm working on more. There are a bunch now, ~25, so I made a script browser to make it easier for us to browse and launch the scripts.  There are 2 versions of it, an Extenscript one that she uses now, and a CEP version I've been working on that adds a lot of features that will significantly increase its usefulness and the development speed of our scripts (Mainly, it adds GitHub support for auto-updating and bug reporting).

On my computer, all of this works perfectly.  Unfortunately, on her Mac, the CEP extension version is showing in her extensions menu, but when she launches the extension, the panel is blank, and not even the earliest of debug alerts will run, so the extension is not running at all.  Then I found out it's this way for all of her CEP extensions that she has tried; they show up, but will not run.  We've added playerdebug for 11 and 12, and she is on Illustrator CC2025, so I am not really sure what to do at this point.  I've tried to get a localhost connection to work, but that never connects, and we tried to figure it out with her Mac console (and AI guidance), but got nowhere. Any ideas? Pretty colors for attention:

If anyone would like access to these, I'd be willing to share.  They allow you to set custom script folders and customize their appearance in the launcher(in the CEP version).  Scripts are searchable.  You can set custom names and descriptions for scripts.  You can use new scripts without restarting Illustrator.  You can favorite, hide, or reorder the scripts..  I am sure there is more that I'm missing.

Here is the old ExtendScript one... NO PRETTY LIGHTS!  Please help me help her get the pretty lights!

Thank you!!!!

[Manan Joshi]

Check the vesion of CSXS version used in the manifest. Trying adding playerdebug mode to other versions as well. Check the CEP logs they must have something.

-Manan

[Matt_Franks]

Thanks for looking at this issue for me!  The issue turned out to be that her PlayerDebug was never actually set correctly.  It's working now!!  WOOOOHOOOOO!!!

[iLLMonkey]

I'm having a similar problem, I haven't solved it completely yet BUT, I suspect it has something to do with the GPU not being able to use 'metal', I'm running mac on a virtual machine. I'm speculating that the macOS 2025 panels are drawn using 'metal' compared to previous versions.

[Matt_Franks]

I hope you figure out your issue.  Thankfully, ours was not as nuanced as I thought it was, haha..  we just messed up on the very first step of setting playerdebug.

[Andy Swift · Accepted solution]

You can check to make sure debug mode is really enabled on her computer by pasting this into Terminal:

defaults read /Users/Main/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.CSXS.*.plist

Are you using the Chrome debugger?

Create or edit [cep panel]/.debug, containing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<ExtensionList>
    <Extension Id="[ID FROM MANIFEST">
        <HostList>
            <Host Name="ILST" Port="8080"/> 
        </HostList>
    </Extension>
</ExtensionList>

The extension ID line should match the line in CSXS/manifest.xml.

After restarting Illustrator, it should be possible to visit http://localhost:8080/ in the browser and see:

Inspectable WebContents
shell.html

Clicking on shell.html will display the CEP panel in the browser, but mainly it should show you any errors that prevent it from launching.

You didn't (I think) say what computer you yourself are using.

How did you install the panel? By moving it manually into extensions or via ZXP installer (https://aescripts.com/learn/zxp-installer/)?

[Matt_Franks]

Thank you so much for this.  2 days of trying to figure this out, and the whole time we just assumed this could not be it because the extension was visible in her menu, so we thought that meant that playerdubug *had* to have been set correctly.  NOPE!  This showed us the error of our ways; we corrected it, and now the panel opens and runs for her.  You have no idea how happy I am, thank you sooooooooo much!!!!!!

[RobOctopus]

is the extension signed correctly and/or is her computer set up to run unsigned extensions?

[Matt_Franks]

Thank you, but the issue was embarrassingly step 1.  We assumed playerdebug was set correctly, but with the suggestion of testing that theory, we were shown that it was not actually set correctly.  We fixed it and now it's running, thanks for looking at this for me though!