AutoPkgr Deployment strategy

[khey]

Hi guys,

Just implemented AutoPkgr and integrated with Jamf Pro and very happy with the product.

Just wondering how do you guys use it in your environment?

Obviously, we always want to test the policy once its created before releasing it to users.

I am thinking of creating two different Override recipes for each product and tag them accordingly by using modified PolicyTemplate and SmartGroupTemplate xmls and put them on schedule.

For Testing, the policy will be enabled by default and Disabled for Prod and run the recipe manually once we are happy with the test.

The plan is to use the email notification when there is a new package, test it and then run the Prod recipe manually to create a different policy for Users to run.

is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

[mrben]

We have a small team and 30-40 recipes so it's not always practical to test/promote each and every update. There is a JSS-testing and a JSS-prod recipe for each title. The testing recipe scopes the app to a test group while the prod recipe publishes it publicly. We don't use AutoPkgr, but rather an in-house script triggered by our CI/CD system (Bamboo).

The only time we have to intervene is when a buggy app update is released and we need to pin a specific version. In that case, we just update the recipe locally to use a .zip, etc.

[medicis]

It might be worth looking at Veertu Anka Build solution. It enables you to build an AWS like macOS private cloud on-premise and provision macOS VMs with configurable serial nos/product/family(using Anka native hypervisor). You can build a quick setup to test policies (manual and automated), before releasing to users.

[davidacland]

We have a slightly different setup as we're more concerned about broken app updates or packages.

All new pkgs created by autopkg get put into a development folder. These are tested (we check the pkg runs without errors and the app functions normally in each case) and moved to a live folder which are automatically added to the JSS.