I have to confess to not trying other options out there, purely because JAMF’s offering fulfills my requirements well enough.Īs well as its snapshot method, it also has a number of recipes to grab from preinstalled software any required files to package that software that you already have installed.Īlthough not free, it retails at only around US$80 for education and US$100 for others, per license.ĪutoPKG is a relatively new kid on the block in the Mac Admin world. In contrast to Iceberg, Packages can only create flat-packages, which can be both advantageous or disadvantageous depending on your specific requirement.Ĭomposer (part of the JAMF Casper suite but also available separately) is a full snapshot-based packaging tool. Packages also provides a command line tool to assist with the building and automation of package building tasks. The interface is slightly more updated than Iceberg’s and has been simplified to a certain extent. Packages is another GUI Apple package making tool, again developed by WhiteBox, again free to download and use. Iceberg can only create non-flat packages, which can be a disadvantage or an advantage depending on your situation. I say ‘used to’ as this hasn’t been updated since 2011 and, although it works fine, it has been replaced by Packages. At its heart, it’s a very basic packaging environment, and I typically used this to create payload-free installer packages to run scripts, or to create deployable installers for drag and drop software such as Firefox. Iceberg is a GUI Apple package-making tool developed by WhiteBox and is available for free to download. Now for the juicy stuff, I tend to use the following six utilities when packaging applications and installers: mpkg install, and use this combined with secondary and so on installs to customise the install to your requirements, than it is to repackage the software for the sake of it.ĭevelopers spend a lot of time (at least I like to think so) carefully crafting Installers with logic and scripts, that simply by repackaging these, you could break and cause more work for yourself. First a word of advice, typically, it is better to take a developer provided. So number one on my list, is the tools I use for packaging / repackaging applications. It’s this information that I’d like to share with you today.
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