Support installation to subdirectories of `/Applications`

[atommclain]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Describe the solution you'd like
It would be nice to support downloading apps to a custom path. Eg mas install 414568915 --path /Applications/Utilities

Describe alternatives you've considered
I use a Brewfile with brew bundle to run mas, an alternative would be to create a script to manually move the applications to their desired location after calling brew bundle.

cd /Applications
mkdir -p /Applications/Utilities
mv Bakery.app /Applications/Utilities

Additional context
Based on #72 and #376 I gather that supporting installation outside of the /Applications directory is not supported, but a subdirectory seems to work.
If I install an app, then move it to a subdirectory of /Applications', it will still appear in mas list`.

[phatblat]

This is an interesting use case @atommclain. The Mac App Store doesn't support this, but apps can certainly be moved after installation.

Since you follow this practice, how has the Mac App Store treated these relocated apps? Do they get updated correctly? Are the updates installed to the same location, or do they get moved back up to /Applications?

In order for mas to support this, the install command would need support for an optional install path. Also, brew bundle would need the Brewfile syntax to support this optional path as well.

[atommclain]

Since you follow this practice, how has the Mac App Store treated these relocated apps? Do they get updated correctly? Are the updates installed to the same location, or do they get moved back up to /Applications?

I will verify and report back, but I've never had issues updating or applications getting moved up to this point.

In order for mas to support this, the install command would need support for an optional install path. Also, brew bundle would need the Brewfile syntax to support this optional path as well.

Perhaps I am misreading/misunderstanding, but I do believe that there is already support in the Brewfile syntax for passing in custom args. See example: cask "firefox", args: { appdir: "~/my-apps/Applications" } in https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle. So perhaps it would just require updating the install command of mas?

[phatblat]

Ah! I didn't realize that brew bundle supported this appdir argument. In that light, yes, only the mas install command would need similar support.

[atommclain]

Just an update on this issue regarding:

Since you follow this practice, how has the Mac App Store treated these relocated apps? Do they get updated correctly? Are the updates installed to the same location, or do they get moved back up to /Applications?

I moved an application to a sub folder of /Applications/test and updated via mas-cli, the app was updated without issue.

[rgoldberg]

@atommclain In what ways does mas currently fail to support apps that have been moved to sub folders of /Applications?

What additional features do you want for apps in sub folders?

If you just want the ability to move apps, you can do that manually outside of mas. It will require root permissions to do so.

We could provide a command: mas paths <app-id> that would output the paths to all the instances of apps with the given app ID.

Or, once we supply json output with a --json switch, you could extract the paths from the JSON output of mas info <app-id> by piping to something like jq.

Under normal circumstances, there's only one path because there's only one instance of an app with a given app ID, but you could have multiple instances, so mas will return an array / list, normally only one element long.

Would that handle all that you want?

[preethamvishy]

Since the App Store now supports downloading and installing apps to a separate disk, could this be supported with a way to specify custom app dirs?

I installed an app using mas and then moved it to a location not under ~/Applications/*. mas list no longer shows that application. However, to my surprise, the App Store still has an "Open" button under the app (instead of a download again button like I had expected)

[rgoldberg]

@preethamvishy Thanks for the info. Are you talking about this?

I do not have macOS 15. Can you please let me know the folder into which apps are installed on other drives? Is it /Volumes/<volume>/Applications? Can you only select one extra drive? Is it just all apps > 1GB, or are there other criteria for selection?

We could automatically include the correct folders.

Later (probably not soon, unless tons of people request this or unless someone submits a PR), we could also add a setting to manually specify folders to include, if enough people manually move apps. We don't currently save any settings info, however, so we need to decide how to store such data (file format, location, etc.).

Are there any other changes that you want?

The existing issue here is more about arguments to mas install to manually specify a different install folder, so the 2 changes mentioned in this issue should be separate issues. The latter of the 2 issues could be a precursor for this issue (using mas install --path <folder> to install to a folder outside /Applications would automatically add <folder> to the list of app folders).

[preethamvishy]

Are you talking about this?

Yes, that's the App Store support I had mentioned.

Can you please let me know the folder into which apps are installed on other drives? Is it /Volumes/<volume>/Applications

Yes, that's correct

Can you only select one extra drive?

Yes, it only seems to allow a single selection from a dropdown. You choose the disk and /Volumes/<volume>/Applications gets auto-created (presumably if it's not already present)

Is it just all apps > 1GB, or are there other criteria for selection?

By default, it seems to be all apps greater than 1 GB. However, for tracking, it does not seem to have a minimum size limit: I downloaded an app from the App Store that was ~350 MB. It got installed in /Applications by default, and then I moved it to /Volumes/<volume>/Applications. App Store is still able to detect it as installed.

Edit: to fix typo in /Applications

[rgoldberg]

@preethamvishy Thanks for info.

Did you mean ~/Applications or /Applications (note the ~ prefix in the former)?

Currently, mas only works with /Applications.

That's because macOS seems to track Mac App Store apps everywhere. People who had folders of old versions of their apps were having them get in the way of the current apps in mas.

Currently, mas looks under /Applications. That could be changed to /Volumes/*/Applications.

Plus, mas could allow users to specify what folders they want mas to use. That would require mas starting to use a config file & using mas config to set settings.