Automating Drag and Drop DMG's

[MrBingham917]

Hey again- I want to pick your brains for a second. . .

How do you go about dealing with DMG files where you drag the installer into the /Applications folder.

Do you do the composer capture, Upload the DMG into Admin, or script it out?

The app in question that I am working on is Audacity with LAME encoder.

Thanks a bunch.

Robert Bingham.

[rockpapergoat]

preferably, use munki instead. it handles this scenario without any added work on your part. :)

the casper way is probably to use a wrapper script to install the app from the mounted dmg. check the resource kit; i believe there's something in there that will at least perform a pkg install. not sure offhand if it handles app bundle copies…

[mm2270]

Scripting a copy from the DMG is possible, but why not just copy the app to the /Applications folder (or wherever you want it to end up), open Composer, click in an empty area in your Sources list and then drag/drop the new app into it? It captures the app and the path into a new source named by the app with no extra stuff to weed out. Now just make it into a DMG, upload and deploy.

For simple stuff like this, why complicate it with install scripts mounting DMGs, etc? If you have settings to ride along with it, those can be captured separately and deployed along with the app, or not.

[rockpapergoat]

it will be more flexible as a pkg install rather than a dmg "package" used by casper.

you can use composer for this, of course. i'd argue it's a waste of time to package an app that doesn't need it, but go for it if that's what you want.

likewise, take a look at both luggage and the app2luggage script included for quickly creating pkgs. it's all i use for my pkg building.

https://github.com/unixorn/luggage

[tlarkin]

Hey guys,

I am sitting in the airport about to catch a plane. Read this post and to waste a few minutes I decided to comment. I will ditto what Mike posted. Any app that is self contained drag it to the apps folder, and then drag and drop it in Composer. Composer will then build the app and it can be deployed in that manner. It will capture the full path, ie /Applications/myapp. I have used this method a lot in the past when I was a sys admin. I also used it to package up things like widgets.

Easy and straight forward and no need to complicate it. As long as it is just the app you want to push out, and the app is self contained. If you have to capture extra stuff like /Library/Application Support, or stuff that gets put in the ~/ directories, you may want to look at doing a snap shot.

Thanks,
Tom