I have a program (created by a colleague, ported from Linux but successfully compiles on Mac) that I need to deploy to lots of Mac workstations. Currently we do so by pushing out pkg files (not ones we created).
My general question (that others may find the answers to useful) is how do I go about packaging a command line program/script into a pkg file that installs the program? The usual method to package an .app file seems documented well enough, but there is scant details about taking an arbitrary program and wrapping it in a pkg installer.
The man pages for pkgbuild (etc) make a lot of assumptions - that you've already built an app with xcode, that you're intending to use an .app and can generate plists, etc. All we want to do is let the mac server install a non-app program, and it wants to use pkgs.
It would be best if the solution were scriptable so that every time we update the program we can easily create a new pkg file. If a decent resource already explaining this process can be linked that of course would also work great. The question here: Making OS X Installer Packages like a Pro - Xcode Developer ID ready pkg doesn't match the need to simply install a basic cli program.
I would recommend Packages.
It's scriptable so it can become part of your build process and generates a nice mpkg for you.
We are using it to automate the download of third-party libraries, and then the invocation of make to compile, as well as the installation of compiled files.
As a note, although this will generate a mpkg, most distributions are done with disk images, so we also use hdiutil to create a sparse image, copy the mpkg into it, convert it to a compressed read-only dmg and then distribute that.
An example of this procedure would be:
1) Create Sparse RW DMG file.
hdiutil create -size 100M -type SPARSE -volname "MyInstaller" -fs HFS+ MyInstaller.dmg.sparseimage
2) Attach to image. Note disk and mounted volume name from output (ex. /dev/disk2s1 and /Volumes/MyInstaller)
hdiutil attach MyInstaller.dmg.sparseimage
3) Copy in mpkg installer
cp -R Packages/build/My_Packages.mpkg /Volumes/MyInstaller/
4) Detech from image.
hdiutil detach -force {mounted disk} (ex. hdiutil detach -force /dev/disk2s1)
5) Create compressed read only image from writable sparse image.
hdiutil convert "MyInstaller.dmg.sparseimage" -format UDZO -o "MyInstaller.dmg" -ov -imagekey zlib-level=9
Related
There is no useful information on the site describing how to install the file .I have tried extracting the .tar file, installing through command prompt . there is no information available on the web.OS used is windows 11. Its for a project to extract data from images, using OCR. Poppler is used for getting page numbers of the pdf file which will be converted to an image file later in the process."https://poppler.freedesktop.org/" is the site from which I downloaded the file.Is this the right site.Any answer is helpful.Thank you
Poppler source is constantly updated, and thus common for Linux and Mac users to build or brew on demand. It is not much different when using Programming Suites like Python, Ruby etc.
Windows users expect one exe, but the poppler utils were built as a spin off from non-commercial licensed xpdf and for personal 32 bit users that is often simpler.
I have given examples for how simple that xpdf unpacking can be for one exe in several posts such as https://stackoverflow.com/a/68697144/10802527 (how to scan a file list, not used here) and https://stackoverflow.com/a/73123537/10802527 (how to use to run a single file) and
https://stackoverflow.com/a/73437398/10802527 (running one exe on demand)
Poppler prebuilt binaries are available as 64bit only so the first step after making a work directory is download latest version from https://github.com/oschwartz10612/poppler-windows using most current
https://github.com/oschwartz10612/poppler-windows/releases/download/v22.04.0-0/Release-22.04.0-0.zip and save to the working folder, then you can use right click Extract All... OR
tar -m -xf Release-22.04.0-0.zip to unpack in that folder so it should look like in the binary folder
Now the exe files are in a subdirectory and when using those it is best if that folder is included on the path environment.
RESIST any means to add using set or worse setx simply add folder via system gui, note in some cases after saving the setting it may need log off and log on to stick and in very rare cases even a reboot/restart.
I have created a flat .pkg file with following options on 10.7 using PackageMaker 3.0.6:
/Applications/PackageMaker.app/Contents/MacOS/Package --root ./myroot \
--id com.myroot.pkg --title "My Root" --scripts ./scripts --target 10.5 \
--verbose --resources ./resources --root-volume-only --domain system \
--no-relocate --versio 1.0 --certificate "My Cert Name"
In the resources folder I have background.png, Welcome.rtf and License.rtf and in the scripts folder I have preflight, postflight and various support files for those scripts. The resulting .pkg appears to be fully functional except that the installer does not display my background, welcome or license.
How can I add a custom background, welcome and license to a flat package?
As far as I can tell, the Distribution file in the .pkg is missing references to the background, welcome and license files.
As a workaround I tried using xar. If I unpack the package with xar like so:
xar -xf ./myroot.pkg -C work
and add the 3 tags for those files, then pack it again with xar:
cd work && xar -cf ../myroot2.pkg *
I get a package that starts installation ok with my background etc., but when it comes time to install my .app I get these errors (from /var/log/install.log):
run preupgrade script for myroot
Could not create task for action: run preupgrade script for myroot2
Install failed: The Installer could not extract files from the package for myroot2. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.
IFDInstallController 863170 state = 7
I have also tried Flat Package Editor: open myroot.pkg, drag out Distribution, edit it, drag it back, delete old Distribution, save. Same problem as with xar.
I would prefer to have a fully scriptable solution as opposed to using GUIs.
Edit: I have also tried to use pkgutil to expand, edit Distribution, and reflatten a flat package. This gets the icons and readme in the installer, but the installer is then unable to unpack the payload. Same if I reflatten with Flat Package Editor. I have also tried to create an expanded package without PackageMaker (which works, except on 10.8), but when I try to flatten that with pkgutil the result is a corrupted package again.
PackageMaker always was buggy has hell, and got deprecated with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
You should use pkgbuild together with productbuild.
This Mac Installers Blog has some useful posts about Packagemaker including details about the usage and solutions to common problems. Hope it will help.
Check out the Luggage - it's a Makefile helper file that lets you create OS X packages with sane Makefiles. Disclaimer: I am the original author for it, though there are a lot of other people's contributions in it now.
I have an Ant script which turns my Java application into a nice Mac Bundle using the JarBundler task. The problem is how do I now turn that into a .pkg file for distribution?
I'm looking at using the packagemaker command line tool (located in /Developer/usr/bin/packagemaker) but it has a number of drawbacks:
If I use the '--doc' option to point it to a .pmdoc file (built using the PackageMaker GUI) then I will have to manually change the .pmdoc contents whenever I add files to my project
If I use the '--root' option to build the package based on the app bundle then it seems I don't get many of the features of the GUI (such as including the licence text).
How do other people produce a .pkg file with their build script?
Thanks
I use the following to build a package from a pmdoc and the the DMG containing the package on OS X 10.6:
/Developer/usr/bin/packagemaker --verbose --doc [project].pmdoc --out [project].pkg
mkdir -p dmg
cp -pR [project].pkg dmg
hdiutil create dmg/[Project]-r$SVN_REVISION.dmg -volname "[Project]" -fs HFS+ -srcfolder dmg
I use scripts to automatically update parts of the PackageMaker file. I found it more convenient to keep the old format .pmproj files rather than to switch to the more recent bundle format.
You can use packagemaker's --resources options to add a resources folder to the package. If you're building an older-style package (10.3 and maybe 10.4 target), all you need to do is put files with appropriate names (e.g. (License,ReadMe,Welcome).(rtf|html) and Background.(jpg|gif|pdf|tif)) optionally organized into .lproj subfolders, and they'll included & used by the package. This doesn't seem to work with distribution packages (10.5-style flat packages and some 10.4 packages), as the resource file names have to be listed in the distribution file, and I'm not sure how to put them there with packagemaker.
Is it possible to build a .dmg file (for distributing apps) from a non-Mac platform?
And if yes, how?
Yep, mkfs.hfsplus does it.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo.dmg bs=1M count=64
mkfs.hfsplus -v ThisIsFoo /tmp/foo.dmg
This creates a dmg file (in this case 64M) that can be mounted on a mac. It can also be mounted on linux, with something like
mount -o loop /tmp/foo.dmg /mnt/foo
after wich you just copy the content you want to it (in /mnt/foo). Unmount it, and the dmg can be copied over to a mac and mounted there.
A project I work on creates DMG files on Linux using genisoimage:
mkdir -p dmgdir/progname.app/Contents/{MacOS,Resources}
...copy your PkgInfo, Info.plist to Contents...
...copy your .icns to Resources...
...copy your other things to where you expect them to go...
genisoimage -V progname -D -R -apple -no-pad -o progname.dmg dmgdir
If you want to be really fancy, you can steal the .DS_Store file from a DMG made on a Mac with a volume name progname and app bundle called progname.app (i.e., matching what you want to create off the Mac) where you've put a background in .background/background.png and a symbolic link to /Applications in the root dir, and put that in dmgdir along with your own a symbolic link to /Applications.
Finally, if you want to create a compressed DMG, get the dmg tool from libdmg-hfsplus:
dmg uncompressed.dmg compressed.dmg
git clone https://github.com/hamstergene/libdmg-hfsplus
cd libdmg-hfsplus && cmake . && make && cd dmg
./dmg --help
Makefile:
dmg:
genisoimage -D -V "$(PROJECT) $(VERSION)" -no-pad -r -apple -o project-$(VERSION)-uncompressed.dmg $(DARWIN_DIR)
./dmg dmg project-$(VERSION)-uncompressed.dmg project-$(VERSION).dmg
uncompressed works out of the box, compression may cause problems - the origin/master at least produces a 'checksum' error on snow-leopard
It does seem possible to create DMG files with some third party tools. A quick google search reveals at least a few commercial tools:
TransMac
MagicISO
Not sure about any OSS/freeware options, but it does at least seem possible if you are so inclined.
Edit: I also forgot about MacDrive, which is another great tool for working with HFS+ filesystems under windows. Since a DMG is basically just a HFS+ filesystem snapshot, it is probably possible with MacDrive to create DMG's as well.
I'm not sure if anyone is still watching this thread, but I tried TransMac as recommended by Nik Reiman.
Using this tool I was able to, running on Windows 7, create dmg files which were mountable on OSX 10.8.3.
Downside
The only downside for us is that this tool doesn't appear to be command-line friendly; for us that's a deal-breaker as we need to be able to have an automated tool which our build server (Windows based) can use to build dmg files on-the-fly.
See mkfs.hfsplus
If you're distributing Mac apps, then surely you have a Mac to write and test them. Why not simply use that same Mac to create the disk image?
[Edit] Alternatively, if you're distributing a portable app, for example a Java .jar file, why bother with a disk image? Macs understand .zip and .tar.gz archives just fine.
I guess what I'm getting at is, I don't understand how one might need a DMG disk image, but not have a Mac with which to create it.
So from what little I understand about packaging for Macs, I see that the actual program that launches is the one defined under the CFBundleExecutable key in Info.plist.
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>JavaApplicationStub</string>
Now, my app doesnt work if /APP/Content/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub is not chmodded +x (It just fails silently without doing anything, which is a pain!).
Fair enough, its not executable I guess. But its a big problem if you are copying the app from somewhere that dosent support +x properties on files; such as windows, fat32 USB keys, CDROMs, websites, zip files, etc...
What can I do in these instances to make the app able to run? Manually setting the execute bit is not an option.
There's got to be people who run Mac apps off CD, at the very least!
I think your only option is to package the APP bundle into a DMG file, or tar.
DMG is more standard and just as easy to do as using tar or zipping. The command line we use is:
hdiutil create -srcfolder Last.fm.app -format UDZO -imagekey zlib-level=9 -scrub Last.fm.dmg
You can tar from any platform, (even Windows, if you install cygwin, or use the GNU standalone, http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gtar.htm)
tar cf app.tar app_directory
With gzip compression:
tar czf app.tar.gz app_directory
#mxcl, that works, sort of, thanks. However, you need to be on a Mac to run hdiutil :(.
Also, it mucks up the paths of the app... there were some files(like the db file) that were not inside the .app folder, and thus are not included in the .DMG file.
Im building on windows, and the app is getting deployed to removable media. The whole point is to avoid installing anything.
The app runs on windows aswell, so there is a windows .exe alongside the mac.app on the root of the disk. There is also a sqllite.db file that both versions of the application share. Multi-platform is hard :/