Investigation: 'Cannot read property 'pid' of null'

[jessicaschilling]

We're seeing a variety of reports of TypeError: Cannot read property 'pid' of null in Desktop but no clear root cause. Need to investigate whether the crash reports we are seeing are actually a side effect of something else. Collating all current/closed reports of this error here for the sake of beginning an investigation:

ipfs/ipfs-webui#1670
#1702
#1711
#1706
#1714
#1482 (may not be relevant)
#1479 (may not be relevant)
#1723 (related - see below comment - but this error is TypeError: ctx.manualCheckForUpdates is not a function)

[jjv360]

Hi, I'm getting this error on IPFS Desktop on Windows 10 (version 0.13.2)... Steps to reproduce:

• Run ipfs daemon from a terminal window
• Start IPFS Desktop
• Close the terminal that was running ipfs daemon
• Press Restart from the tray menu
• Wait about 10 seconds

I assume IPFS desktop can't handle switching from a manual ipfs daemon to it's own built-in one... But I have to run it this way unfortunately (#1723)

[lidel]

I believe this was caused by the bug fixed in ipfs/js-ipfsd-ctl#554
We bumped ipfsd-ctl to new version in #1735 (review)
and now restarting multiple times and switching back and forth seems to work as expected.

I am closing this, assuming it will be fixed in next release (0.14.0).
Feel free to reopen if this comes back in IPFS Desktop >=0.14