Advanced Mac Installer

Overview

Using Packages, we can build a .pkg file for an existing app (.app). The tool allows us to customise the installation procedure to capture the admin entered values from /tmp/sym_settings.txt and /tmp/sym_permissions.txt

Pre-requisites

Xcode build tools
Packages
Python 3. Needs to accessible as python in the command line.

Build Process

Once we have Packages installed, we'll just need to run the following command which should take care of creating the .pkg build for us.

packagesbuild -v installer/mac/symphony-mac-packager.pkgproj

The above command creates the build 'Symphony.pkg' and places it into the directory installer/mac/build relative to the project root.

Note that the packages project file 'symphony-mac-packager.pkgproj' contains link to the pre install and the post install scripts both of which are relative to 'symphony-mac-packager.pkgproj'.

Implementation Details

Pre installation script checks to see if the version we are installing is higher than the already installed version. If the installed version is lower, it deletes the installed version.
Post installation script reads data from the temp files and replaces the values in the 'Symphony.config' file in the installed app

Known Issues

During installation, there is a section called "Destination Select" which is skipped based on the OS and it's settings. This is a known bug.

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