Bundled Tools on Install

Why this changed

Some scan surfaces (especially Mobile and parts of Network) still rely on external helper binaries that are not pure-Python. On a stock machine those binaries may be missing from the host PATH, which produces errors such as "adb: not found" or "nmap: not found".

Current builds may bundle selected helper tools under resources/bundled-tools/ when the platform, license, and distribution policy allow it. At launch PhantomYerra prepends the detected bundled-tools directories to the child-process PATH, but it can also fall back to a system-installed copy when a helper is not bundled in the current build.

What's bundled

Exact contents depend on your platform, the current build policy, and your license tier. Common helper categories include:

• Mobile: adb, aapt, Android platform tools.
• Mobile (APK analysis): apktool (via bundled JRE where needed), dex2jar.
• Network: nmap (under bundled-tools/win/nmap/ or bundled-tools/linux/nmap/).
• Cross-platform JARs: shared .jar files under bundled-tools/shared/.

Pure-Python engines do not need these helpers at all — they run natively inside the bundled sidecar runtime.

How to confirm the bundle is active

1. 1

   Launch PhantomYerra

   Start the app normally. At boot, the main process logs one line (visible in Settings → Health → Diagnostic Logs or in %APPDATA%\PhantomYerra\logs\main.log):

   [bundled-tools] PATH prepend: C:\Program Files\PhantomYerra\resources\bundled-tools\win;...

   If the line reads "No bundled-tools directories found on disk — relying on system PATH", the current build did not ship that helper bundle or the install is incomplete.

2. 2

   Run a Mobile or Network scan

   Click 📱 Mobile or 🏗️ Network / Infrastructure on the Home screen. Complete the wizard. Click Launch Assessment. Watch the 📜 Logs tab — early events should show adb start-server (Mobile) or nmap -sV (Network) completing successfully, not failing with "not found".

If a tool still reports "not found"

Check in this order:

1. Antivirus quarantine. Some AV products quarantine the bundled executables as "unknown publisher". Open your AV's quarantine log; if a PhantomYerra binary is there, restore it and add C:\Program Files\PhantomYerra\resources\bundled-tools\ (Windows) or the equivalent Linux path to AV exclusions.
2. Partial install. If you extracted a portable build rather than running the installer, the bundled-tools folder may have been skipped. Re-run the official installer end to end.
3. Permission issue on Linux. The Linux AppImage extracts binaries at runtime. If your fs is mounted noexec, the extracted binaries can't run. Move the AppImage to a partition without noexec, or extract with ./PhantomYerra-*.AppImage --appimage-extract and run from there.
4. Install manually as a fallback. Any of the bundled tools can be installed at the OS level — winget install Nmap.Nmap on Windows, apt install nmap android-tools-adb on Debian/Ubuntu. PhantomYerra's PATH prepend doesn't block a system-installed copy; it just prefers the bundled one.
5. Contact tester support. If the issue persists, email phantomyerra@coesecurity.com with the log line, the scan surface, and the "not found" error.

Installer size impact

Bundled-helper size varies by platform and release policy. Use the diagnostics and build notes as the truth source instead of assuming one fixed bundled-binary footprint across all releases.

How the PATH prepend works (for the curious)

The Electron main process runs a one-time helper at boot that walks resources/bundled-tools/{platform}/, resources/bundled-tools/{platform}/nmap/, and resources/bundled-tools/shared/, keeping only the directories that actually exist. It joins them with the OS path separator (; on Windows, : on Linux) and prepends the result to the PATH environment variable that's passed to every Python sidecar spawn and every scanner subprocess. Nothing is copied to the user's system PATH — the modification only affects child processes of PhantomYerra.