If you want to create a very simple package for a single component application, the easiest tool for the job is pkgutil. This approach can be adapted for your own needs. I’m going to give a quick overview on how I use these three utilities to build the flat package for our product. It also provides a number of options for examining package contents and performing tasks like package verification and repair. If it’s a pkg file, pkgutil can work with it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a product archive or a component package.
With pkgutil, you can rip a package apart and then put it back together again. Pkgutil is kind of like a Swiss Army knife for packages. If you create apps for the Mac App store, this is the tool you’ll be using to build your packages. Even JavaScript is supported for some things. You can customize the UI, as well as explicitly declare installation prerequisites such as the minimum required RAM, OS version, etc. I like to think of it as a package of packages. Productbuild is a tool for creating a “product archive”, which is kind of like a super-package. It also supports preinstall/postinstall scripts. The resulting package will contain the payload for a single component. Pkgbuild is a tool for creating a very basic, bare-bones component package. Developers were left with three terminal-based utilities that could be used to build packages – pkgbuild, productbuild, and pkgutil.įor more information on the evolution of OSX packages, I highly recommend reading this MacTech article which goes into the subject in some depth.
PackageMaker, a wart in the eyes of many developers and source control systems, was officially deprecated and dropped in Xcode 4.6 (and there was much rejoicing :-)). Previously, if you wanted to distribute one of these packages, you’d have to put the package inside a DMG or tar it up.Īnother interesting thing happened during the evolution of OSX packages. Package bundles, for example, contain files used as part of the install process such as a bill of materials, the application payload, and a collection of localized resources among other things. They were bundles, which are just folders that OSX treats in a special way. Prior to Leopard (10.5), packages weren’t flat at all. Flat packages are simple, self-contained files that are easy to pass around. We didn’t require a huge amount of sophistication from the installer. I was recently involved with a daemon-style Java project that needed a simple installer solution for OSX.
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