Developer Advisory: WP 6.4.3 causes “Incompatible Archive” on upload error 

The release of WP 6.4.3 introduced code which categorizes plugin files zipped on macOS machines to be deemed incompatible for upload. 

The details

With the introduction of the following checks in the core files of the plugin uploader, plugin files which are zipped on macOS computers fail checks, and are ultimately unable to be uploaded as a plugin via the admin interface. 

This issue is being addressed by the WordPress core team, and is scheduled to be included as a fix in WP 6.4.4. 

How can I tell if this affects me?

If you are a developer of WooCommerce plugins*, and you created and uploaded your zip file on a macOS machine, consumers of your product may receive an “Incompatible Archive” error upon upload of the plugin file. 

If you are consuming plugins, and you encounter this error, you may be consuming a file that has been zipped using the macOS interface. 

*Note: This affects all plugins, not just WooCommerce plugins. For the sake of simplicity, we are referring to how this affects our WooCommerce audience specifically in this post. 

What action should I take?

Ultimately, this will be fixed by sites using an upgraded WordPress version which includes the fix once it is available. In the meantime, there are some workarounds you can use depending on which scenario you find yourself in.

If you are a developer of WooCommerce plugins, you can mitigate this issue by using the macOS command line zip command rather than GUI to zip your plugin file. You will need to re-upload it to your distribution channels. 

If you are consuming plugins, there is a temporary workaround by adding add_filter( 'unzip_file_use_ziparchive', '__return_false' ); as a custom snippet to your WordPress site. This should prevent the upload issue for files which were zipped via macOS interfaces. 


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