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OS X packages

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timsutton edited this page Jan 7, 2013 · 1 revision

The 'osxpkg' type uses Apple's command-line 'pkgbuild' tool to build OS X 'flat' Installer packages. Stéphane Sudre has a great documentation page on what he's been able to document on the flat package format.

ERB templates are used to supply a PackageInfo template to pkgbuild using the --info option. This option is undocumented, but seems there for convenience. It's not the only way to customize a built PackageInfo file.

Requirements

  • running OS X
  • must have 'pkgbuild' in the user's PATH (on vanilla 10.7/10.8 systems, this is already the case – on 10.6, Xcode/Developer Tools version 4.2 must be installed, and you'd most likely need to have /Developer/usr/bin added to your PATH)

FPM feature support

  • input/output
  • pre/post-install scripts (no --remove support as OS X installer has no real uninstall functionality)
  • platform-specific package features:
    • post-install actions (--osxpkg-postinstall-action: logout, restart, shutdown)
    • ownership option (--osxpkg-ownership: passed to pkgbuild's --ownership option)
    • payload-free (--[no-]osxpkg-payload-free: scripts only, no files)
    • dont-obsolete (--osxpkg-dont-obsolete: files to ensure are persistent across future upgrades)

OS X package conventions

OS X packages don't carry the same architecture/dependencies/maintainer metadata that other *NIX packaging systems do, so much of this information is discarded if converting from rpm/deb/solaris.

OS X packages also tend to use a reverse-domain naming convention similar to Java, and this is known as an identifier. This is the only identifier for a package, there is no name.

For example, Apache on OS X uses the identifier org.apache.httpd. For this reason, the --osxpkg-identifier-prefix option should always be used to follow system conventions:

fpm -s dir -t osxpkg --osxpkg-identifier-prefix org.apache --name httpd --version 2.4.3 /opt/apache-staging

When an OS X package is used as input, the name derived will be the last dot-component of the identifier, httpd in this case.

TODO

  • signing options
  • support user-supplied PackageInfo template files for advanced customization
  • build on other platforms?
    • archive formats (.pkg using xar, Payload using gzipped cpio) shouldn't be a problem, but BOM must be generated
    • StackOverflow thread, lsbom sample code - mkbom would need to be written
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