Creating a native Mac Installer for Bosco

It has been our goal for some time to create a native installer for our supported platforms.  This week, we created a prototype for the first of those platforms, the Mac installer.

The PKG file

The first step to creating the installer is the PKG file.  I installed Bosco the usual way, using the multi-platform installer.  Then, I looked through the Bosco files (using a find command) to locate all of the instances of hard coded paths.  They where located in the bosco.sh, bosco_setenv, and the condor_config files.  I modified those to use the environment variable HOME.

Then I used PackageMaker from the auxiliary tools for Mac package available on the Mac developer page (free registration required).  In PackageMaker, I opened the Bosco directory in the home directory.

I unchecked the 'Require admin authentication' because bosco will be installed in the user's home directory.  After these simple steps, I built the installer and tested, everything worked!

DMG File

A DMG is a disk image that is used for software distribution.  The first step is to create the Bosco.dmg disk image using Mac's built-in Disk Utility.

After mounting the DMG, I copied the Bosco installer into the image.  Then, I ran the command:

bless --folder /Volumes/Bosco --openfolder /Volumes/Bosco

This will cause the DMG to automatically open a window when mounting it.

Where to get this

The Bosco DMG makes it very easy to install Bosco on a Mac.  The DMG is available on Dropbox, and will be put in production when a few more minor fixes are put in place.

Bosco.dmg