MSIX Web Installer not working - Error in parsing the app package

Question

I have been all over the other threads about this question but nothing seems to fix my problem. No matter what I do, my .appinstaller doesn't work. I keep getting : Error in parsing the app package.

First off let me say I can access both the .appinstaller file and the .appxbundle file using the direct URLs. Also, I am able to install using .appxbundle and I have a signed certificate. I also tried doing the loopback exemption but that didnt work either. Here is the XML to my .appinstaller

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<AppInstaller
    Uri="http://dev.xxxxxx.com/MSIXPrototype/HelloWorldPackage.appinstaller"
    Version="1.0.7.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/appx/appinstaller/2017/2">
    <MainBundle
        Name="xxxx"
        Version="1.0.7.0"
        Publisher="CN=my_cert"
        Uri="http://dev.xxxxxx.com/MSIXPrototype/HelloWorldPackage_1.0.7.0_x64.appxbundle" />
    <UpdateSettings>
        <OnLaunch
            HoursBetweenUpdateChecks="0" />
    </UpdateSettings>
</AppInstaller>

In addition, I have added all the MIME types to my apache httpd.conf file as such :

    AddType application/appinstaller .appinstaller
    AddType application/msixbundle .msixbundle
    AddType application/appxbundle .appxbundle
    AddType application/msix .msix
    AddType application/appx .appx

I would appreciate any help on this. Thanks!

You may need to check if the Uri http://dev.xxxxxx.com/MSIXPrototype/HelloWorldPackage.appinstaller and http://dev.xxxxxx.com/MSIXPrototype/HelloWorldPackage_1.0.7.0_x64.appxbundle mentioned in your AppInstaller can be accessed. — YanGu, Dec 07 '20 at 08:05
Has your problem been solved after restarting the computer? If the problem is not solved, it is better if you could try to check if .appinstaller(.appinstaller is located on local disk) can install the app with a local uri. — YanGu, Dec 08 '20 at 06:56
Could you please tell me if you have tried the attempts mentioned in my comment? — YanGu, Dec 11 '20 at 08:10

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 07 '20 at 09:08

0

Well, lately I've seen all kinds of strange and similar parsing errors or simply the OS ignoring settings from the XML.

For your case, I've seen only two solutions that worked:

Try a restart of the machine. I know, it's not the advice you would expect but it worked way too many times for others on the MSIX Tech community, so I am not excluding this solution.
Make sure that your URIs don't contain any blank spaces. We had this problem during some internal tests and the OS simply said the .appinstaller file is corrupt and failed to parse it, even if the blank space from the URI was properly escaped ("%20") and the browser was loading it correctly.

answered Dec 07 '20 at 09:08

Bogdan Mitrache

10,536
19
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I will try to restart my computer. Currently we are using Docker to communicate between windows and linux but I already restarted my docker container and that did nothing. My URLs dont contain black spaces. – Brian Shekhtman Dec 07 '20 at 15:58
1

Is there anything in Event Viewer that might help us? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/appxpkg/troubleshooting – Bogdan Mitrache Dec 08 '20 at 08:13
nothing in the event viewer comes up for this. – Brian Shekhtman Dec 08 '20 at 17:59

viraptor · Answer 2 · 2021-08-21T23:17:48.543

0

There's a rarely mentioned requirement for hosting which can cause this error. Your web server (and/or all the loadbalancers / caches in front) has to support Range headers in the request.

This means you can't host your app installer on (for example) Netlify and many other providers. Mentioned here in context of S3.

edited Aug 21 '21 at 23:17

answered Aug 21 '21 at 23:11

viraptor

33,322
10
107
191

MSIX Web Installer not working - Error in parsing the app package

2 Answers2