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Note that this guide only applies if you have checked “Find apps and prefs via Spotlight (deprecated)” in Raycast Preferences > Advanced If you use the default preferences (unchecked), please use the App Diagnostics guide

We use the Spotlight index on your system to list apps and preference panes in Raycast's root search. If you're not seeing any apps, Raycast notifies you with a new item in root search and leads you to this troubleshooting page:

Raycast notifying you when it cannot find any apps

You can check a couple of things to make sure that Spotlight is enabled on your system. Please make sure that you run the latest version of Raycast (use the Check for Updates command in Raycast) and that you run through this guide from top to bottom.

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Spotlight alternative from Raycast v1.2.0 on: we added a feature that does not rely on the machine's Spotlight index. You can enable that via Preferences → Advanced → App Search. You can check and see if that leads to better results for you. If you want to stick to the default Spotlight index instead, you can run through the following sections.

Update via Raycast

First you can try to manually trigger an apps and preferences refresh by running the "Refresh Apps and Preferences" command in Raycast:

Manually triggered apps and preferences refresh through Raycast root search command

Wait a bit and see if your apps can be found now. If not, see the next step to check your Spotlight Preferences.

Spotlight Preferences

Go to macOS System Preferences → Spotlight and check both the Search Results and Privacy tabs. Check that Applications are enabled and no applications folders you want to get searched by Raycast are excluded on the Privacy tab.

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You can still leave the checkbox Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Look up unchecked since Raycast has its own suggestions system.

Note that it might take a while until changes in Spotlight preferences take effect.

Spotlight System Preferences

Rebuilding Spotlight Index

In case both Spotlight and Raycast do not show expected results, Apple suggests to rebuild the Spotlight index by first adding and then removing folders via the Privacy tab under macOS Spotlight preferences (see above). Try adding the applications folder (or other folders where your apps are located that you cannot find via Raycast) to the Privacy tab and removing it again. This is also described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716 If that still does not lead to to the apps being shown, you can try some commands on the terminal:

Spotlight Indexing (via Terminal)

You can check via the terminal if Spotlight indexing is enabled and in case it’s disabled, turn it on again:

Open a new Terminal window and enter:

mdutil -sa

This should print information about your volumes and whether indexing is enabled or disabled.

If you see a message that indexing is disabled, you can turn it off and on by entering and confirming with your admin password:

sudo mdutil -ai off
sudo mdutil -ai on

After running those commands, it will take a while until all apps should start showing up again.

Reindexing

There's another mdutil command available for rebuilding the index. The following command would trigger rebuilding the index on all volumes:

sudo mdutil -Ea

After running the command, make sure again that indexing is turned on via mdutil -sa and wait some time. Then check the apps again via both Spotlight and Raycast.

Raycast Spotlight Diagnostics

Raycast has a built-in diagnostics tool to further help with debugging this issue:

On the main screen (root search) in Raycast, press the hidden shortcut ⌘ ⇧ ^ ⌥ I (cmd + shift + control + option + I)
On the screen that appears, press the button Export Diagnostics next to the Spotlight label. Wait a bit for the Save File dialog to show up and save the log file.
Open the log file with some text editor and check:

Under the label mdutil_sav, does the output show that indexing is enabled? If it shows disabled, follow the steps detailed under "Spotlight Indexing" above.
Under the label mdfind_apps_prefs, can you find the path to the missing app in the list? If yes, but the app is still not shown in Raycast, please get in touch with us and let us know the name and path of the app. From Raycast v1.1.0 on, you will also find a second list in the log file after the title systemsource_apps_prefs. Please check that list as well for your missing app and get in touch with us in case you find the app in the mdfind_apps_prefs list but not in the systemsource_apps_prefs list.

If the app is not listed and you have tried all other steps above in this guide, it seems that the Spotlight query cannot find your app – which may be caused by missing metadata attributes for that particular app. You can check metadata by running the following command on the terminal:

mdls /path/to/app

Replace /path/to/app with the full absolute path to the app that does not show up in Raycast, for instance mdls /Applications/Slack.app. After running the command, you should see a number of attribute names and values (similar to the output of the Raycast app itself in your diagnostics text file under mdls_raycast). Double check that the following attributes are present:

Name	Value
kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier	This should be ID of the app, usually a reverse-domain name such as com.raycast.macos
kMDItemContentType	com.apple.application-bundle
kMDItemDisplayName	Name of the app

In addition, please run the following command to check whether the path attribute is present (this is not printed by default via the mdls command above):

mdls -name kMDItemPath /path/to/app

For instance, to check Slack, just run mdls -name kMDItemPath /Applications/Slack.app and check that it outputs the path to the Slack app.

If all metadata attributes seem alright, but the app is still not listed in Raycast, you can get in touch with us.

Apps missing in root search