How to fix that "Found a likely App Store app that is not indexed in Spotlight"

[bric3]

I have an app that is NOT purchased on the app store, but the on the Mac Appstore there's an app with the same name. Is there a way to avoid this ?

mas upgrade
Warning: Found a likely App Store app that is not indexed in Spotlight in /Applications/Lunar.app

         Indexing now, which will not complete until sometime after mas exits

         Disable auto-indexing via: export MAS_NO_AUTO_INDEX=1

[rgoldberg]

mas assumes that any app whose folder contains a Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt is an app from the App Store. Does your Lunar folder contain that?

Is that a TestFlight app, a Homebrew Cask, a normal non-App-Store app, etc.?

If you run the following before running mas update, it should skip checking for any apps that mas thinks are from the App Store, so the warning should not be displayed:

export MAS_NO_AUTO_INDEX=1

The problem is that is a blanket disable, so that stops the behavior for real App Store apps that somehow need to be indexed just to avoid repeatedly indexing the same false positive.

In the future, I might allow skipping the check for specific apps, instead of a blanket, but not now. Even if the environment variable solves your problem, could you hold off on using it permanently until after we've diagnosed this issue as much as possible to fix any mas problems possible?

Thanks.