macOS fileproviderctl Is Your Friend

Developing a file provider for macOS is more pleasant developer experience than for iOS. At least in my opinion. One of the reasons is the availabilty of helpful command-line tools like fileproviderctl.

When I started with file providers on macOS, I did not know or read about it in the first place. Actually I cannot remember how I found it. Anyway, it ships with macOS and is a very handy developer tool. For me, it provides me with these valuable features in daily development work:

• Removal of file provider domains to restore a clean development environment. This probably is the most important.
• Listing all currently set up file provider domains.
• Signalling a file provider which is handy to manually trigger the change enumeration.
• Check and inspect file provider domain status.

And it can do a lot more. Sadly, I was not abled to grasp everything of it yet. Especially the debug output. To my knowledge, there is no such tool available for iOS. Well, those are separate devices with their own security system you cannot simply SSH into like you open a Terminal on macOS.