Upgrading to Mac OS Big Sur as a Developer

Source: https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/update-mac-os-3521995/

The Mac OS Big Sur upgrade notification had been sitting in my App Store icon for many weeks. One time I decided to upgrade, I didn’t have enough disk space. After making mandatory Google searches regarding stability/reliability of the upgrade, I decided to finally plunge in and upgrade. My previous upgrades to Mohave and Catalina had been relatively painless, unlike this time.

A. Before

1. Making Enough Disk Space Available

The upgrade requires 35.5GB of available storage.

Open “Storage Management” and delete unnecessary files. I had 20GB of files stored in the Developer cache from the previous downloads of Xcode.

2. Take Backups

Since the upgrade process may go wrong and make your computer unusable.

B. During

Upgrade may require many hours. Make sure you have power connected the entire time.

C. After

1. Apache NetBeans Failed to Launch

After some troubleshooting, it turns out that it wasn’t pointing to the correct JDK path.

Run the following command to determine JDK path

/usr/libexec/java_home -- v

In my case, the output was

% /usr/libexec/java_home -- /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_211.jdk/Contents/Home

Locate the netbeans.conf file inside the contents of NetBeans app. In my case it was at/Applications/NetBeans/Apache\ NetBeans\11.0.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf. Point the property netbeans_jdkhome to the correct JDK path, and relaunch NetBeans.

2. FortiClient VPN Client Failed to Connect to IPSEC VPN

Big Sur comes with some native VPN upgrades and may conflict with non-native VPN clients. I managed to make FortiClient VPN client work after installing version 6.4 from https://d3gpjj9d20n0p3.cloudfront.net/forticlient/downloads/FortiClient_6.4.2.1305_macosx.dmg.

3. Google Chrome and Brave Browsers Randomly Crashing

The problem started with some webpages “Aw, Snap”ing very frequently.

Sometimes relaunching the browser one or many times fixed the error. At one point, Chrome failed to launch at all. Googling led to the articles asking to reinstall the browser, which was too drastic a solution.

It turned out that my Chrome based browsers were crashing with because of “Too many open files in system”

Checked the limit

% sysctl -A | grep kern.maxfiles
kern.maxfiles: 10240
kern.maxfilesperproc: 10240

To increase the limit permanently, I followed the instructions from this post and created a file limit.maxfiles.plist in the folder /Library/LaunchDaemons/ with chmod to 644, and chown to the root user, with the following contents

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>limit.maxfiles</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>launchctl</string>
            <string>limit</string>
            <string>maxfiles</string>
            <string>64000</string>
            <string>524288</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
        <key>ServiceIPC</key>
        <false/>
    </dict>
</plist>

Used plutil to validate the file

plutil limit.maxfiles.plist

Loaded the plist for now and future reboots

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist

Rechecked the maxfiles and maxfilesperproc limits

% sysctl -A | grep kern.maxfiles
kern.maxfiles: 524288
kern.maxfilesperproc: 64000

No more “Aw, Snap!” so far.

4. Custom Desktop Background

I have my Desktop background pointing to a folder of images. This didn’t carry over to Big Sur. I had to reconfigure the Desktop background pictures folder under “System Preferences” -> “Desktop & Screen Saver”

5. Reindex Locate Database

After upgrading I wasn’t able to run locate command, and I had to reindex locate database using the command

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

Alternatively, we can run

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

6. Reconfigure Apache HTTPD and PHP

After upgrading, all installed modules in my httpd.conf were removed. I had to re-enable PHP module.

To locate httpd.conf, run

locate httpd.conf

My httpd.conf was located at /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. I uncommented the relevant modules in the file and restarted Apache HTTPD

sudo apachectl restart

7. Update Native Node Modules

After upgrading, node-sass Node module stated throwing errors. After some googling I tried to rebuild it using

npm rebuild node-sass

However, it didn’t work.

I realised that I was using Node 12, and I needed to upgrade node-sass to corresponding version 4.12.

8. Update Command Line Tools

After upgrading, Homebrew started throwing this error sometimes:

Error: Your Command Line Tools (CLT) does not support macOS 11.

The solution was to reinstall CLT

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
sudo xcode-select --install