2009-10-25

Losing ZFS

Luis Gerbarg has an interesting article with his thoughts about the reasons behind the absence of ZFS in 10.6 on his blog at http://devwhy.blogspot.com/2009/10/loss-of-zfs.html.

Here's hoping that he's right and Apple is already working on their own next generation filesystem - HFS+ is getting a bit long in the tooth, and it'd be nice to see an alternative in 10.7.

2009-10-12

Released the Luggage

I've been rewriting a tool I originally wrote when I was at Google that allows you to generate an OS X pkg file using a Makefile without using PackageMaker.app's gui at all. At Google we used the internal tool to create most of the packages we used to create disk images with InstaDMG or with puppet. After I left, I missed it, so I'm releasing my rewrite, the Luggage, with the Apache 2.0 license. The source is at http://github.com/unixorn/luggage

What the Luggage provides

Easy repackaging of GUI apps that don't come with Apple pkg installers, custom scripts and configuration files, payload-less packages that do settings changes on target machines in their postflight/postupdate scripts. These packages are easily used in InstaDMG to create master disk images for deployment, or system management systems like puppet to distribute new software to managed Macintoshes.

How it works

You create a Makefile describing where you want each file in the package to end up on the target machines. luggage.make includes rules that will generate a package root with appropriate permissions, copy the files into place, create a package version-stamped with the date, then wrap the package in a disk image file.

So how do I use it?

Requirements for all Makefiles

Every package makefile must include luggage.make, specify a title for the package, a base reversed domain for creating the package id, and the payload listing which files we want installed by the package. Include luggage.make before your variable declarations so your declarations override the internal ones in luggage.make. Please note that TITLE must not include spaces - it's going to be used as part of the package id. Also remember to include luggage.make before any of your definitions so your definitions override the defaults.

include /usr/local/share/luggage/luggage.make
 
TITLE=install_foo
REVERSE_DOMAIN=com.example.corp
PAYLOAD=

Creating a package for a GUI Application

For our first example, we're going to repackage a GUI application that didn't come with a PKG installer. First, tar up the application (making sure to use Apple's tar so resource forks don't get mangled) with /usr/bin/tar cvj Foo.app.tar.bz Foo.app, then update PAYLOAD with
PAYLOAD=unbz2-applications-foo.app

This tells luggage.make that we want Foo.app.tar.bz2 untarred into /Applications. If we want it installed in /Applications/Utilities instead, we'd useunbz2-utilities-foo.app instead, Now we can create a package with "make pkg", or have it automatically wrapped in a disk image with "make dmg". That's all it takes.

Packaging scripts and configuration files

Similarly, if you want to install bar as /usr/local/bin/bar, add pack-usr-local-bin-bar to PAYLOAD. 

Available PAYLOAD additions

 Rule Ownership Permissions Destination
 pack-etc-foo root:wheel 644 /etc/foo
 pack-usr-bin-foo root:wheel 755 /usr/bin/foo
 pack-usr-sbin-foo root:wheel 755 /usr/sbin/foo
 pack-usr-local-bin-foo root:wheel 755 /usr/local/bin/foo
 pack-usr-local-sbin-foo root:wheel 755 /usr/local/sbin/foo
 pack-hookscript-foo root:wheel 755 /etc/hooks/foo
 pack-Library-LaunchAgents-foo root:wheel 644 /Library/LaunchAgents/foo
 pack-Library-LaunchDaemons-foo root:wheel 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/foo
 pack-Library-Preferences-foo root:admin 644 /Library/Preferences/foo
 pack-ppd-foo root:admin 644 /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/foo
 pack-user-template-plist-foo root:wheel 644 /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences/foo
 unbz2-applications-foo root:admin based on tarball contents /Applications/Foo
 ungz-applications-foo root:admin based on tarball contents /Applications/Foo
 unbz2-utilities-foo root:admin based on tarball contents /Applications/Utilities/Foo
 ungz-utilities-foo root:admin based on tarball contents /Applications/Utilities/Foo

Adding preflight/postflight/postinstall/postupdate scripts

Name the script preflight, postflight, postinstall, or postupdate, then add pack-script-XX to PAYLOAD and it will automatically be added to the final package.

Make targets

  • make dmg - create a package, then wrap it in a dmg. Result will be in the current directory.
  • make pkg - create a package and copy it into the current directory
  • make pkgls - create a package, then list the contents so you can confirm it's generating a package with a payload that matches what you're expecting.

Customizing your packages

How do I add a file to my package that is installed somewhere luggage.make doesn't cover?

luggage.make defines several convenience targets that create various directory paths within the package root. You can use them to create the parent directory for your target location, then create your target location. Here's an example that creates /etc/cups so you can install a custom cupsd.conf

l_cups: l_etc
    @sudo mkdir ${WORK_D}/etc/cups
    @sudo chown root:_lp ${WORK_D}/etc/cups
    @sudo chmod 755 ${WORK_D}/etc/cups

pack-cupsd.conf: l_cups
    @sudo ${CP} cupsd.conf ${WORK_D}/etc/cups
    @sudo chown root:_lp ${WORK_D}/etc/cups/cupsd.conf
    @sudo chmod 644 ${WORK_D}/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Now all you need to do is add pack-cupsd.conf to your PAYLOAD variable, and make will create /etc/cups in your package root, change the permissions and ownership, then copy in your cupsd.conf.

I need to install foo with permissions different from the defaults luggage.make uses. How do I change the ownership/permissions for files installed using luggage.make?

You could make your changes using a postflight script, but for convenience, luggage.make runs make modify_packageroot after it has created the package root and copied the install files there, but before it invokes packagemaker's command line tool to create the package.

If you add that target to your package's Makefile, it will override the dummy one in luggage.make and let you change the permissions of files in your package root. ${WORK_D} contains the path to your package root. For example, if your package installed a modified cupsd.conf to /etc/cups, and you needed it to have a group of _lp, you would add the following to your package Makefile:
modify_packageroot:
    @sudo chgrp _lp ${WORK_D}/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

I don't want the package version to be based on the current date. How can I force it to something specific?

By default, luggage.make sets the version number to YYYYMMDD. If you prefer to set it to something specific, set PACKAGE_VERSION=something_numeric.

FAQ

My makefile looks ok, but I get an error about a missing separator

You've probably indented your rules with spaces rather than a tab. Make requires the indentation be with tabs.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Copyright 2007-2010, Joseph P. Block, Some Rights Reserved.

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