AEM/CQ 5.6.1 package file parameter missing

Having the joy and “pleasure” of patching a bunch of AEM/CQ 5.6.1 instances at work recently, I ran into a weird issue where the hotfixes would refuse to install on a particular development machine.

Any attempt to install the packages would result in the following error, regardless of whether or not the upload is done via the CRX PackMgr UI, or via Curl.

{"success":false,"msg":"package file parameter missing"}

I would have assumed that it was a bad package if it wasn’t for the fact that it worked OK on other machines, so started looking for other factors.

$ df -h /tmp
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvdb        30G   29G   88K 100% /tmp

Turns out, the /tmp volume was full on this machine thanks to a lovely collection of heap dumps being stored there. This leads to CQ being unable to write to it’s configured temporary location (which might differ on your install, check for -Djava.io.tmpdir) which is used to store the file between uploading and installing.

Clearing the tmp volume resolves the issue. You might also get this error if your tmp volume can’t be written for any other reason, such as a permissions issue or broken filesystem/mount.

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4 Responses to AEM/CQ 5.6.1 package file parameter missing

  1. Björn Skoglund says:

    I have the same issue, not the /tmp dir though. Is there no way to get a less retarded error message?

    • Jethro Carr says:

      Well this is an Adobe product :-) Haven’t found a more useful message, if it’s not as simple as one filesystem being obviously full it could be a permissions issue.

      You might be able to identify where it is attempting to write with some clever usage of lsof or inotifywatch.

  2. subramanya says:

    Thanks for the update. I had the same issue. It got resolved by clearing /tmp folder

  3. Special Monkey says:

    Thanks for this info, I had no idea what this error meant …

    {“success”:false,”msg”:”package file parameter missing”}

    the same unhelpful error is in AEM 6.1.

    In my case /tmp was defined as a JVM parameter (as /apps/tmp) and did not exist :)

    Regards,

    SM

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