"Packages" app currently not working on Mac - what tool do you use to distribute a .pkg?

MacOSX and iOS
1

I am about to distribute my plugin and was intending to use DropDMG, but found out that I could not create a symlink to the current users components folder ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components.

DropDMG only allows me to deploy to the All Users folder /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components.
So I started to look for an alternative and was recommended Whitebox Packages.

This looked promising, but on my OS, 13.5, had issues as described in this thread by @wavesequencer

Has anyone found an alternative app to help them create a distribution .pkg ?

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2

Packages is (more or less) a glorified ā€œwizardā€ for the built-in command line tools. It will take at most a day to learn these, a great resource to figure out how they work is the Surge repo, as the documentation from Apple is confusing at best.

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I use packages all the time and donā€™t have any issues with it.

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4

I chatted with @wavesequencer at NAMM and from what we could tell at the time the issue there was that inside the bundle the permissions were incorrect, it seemed this was from the build of the plugin itself, nothing to do with packages. Iā€™m not sure if Xcode has maybe caused this change for some reason but I think itā€™s worth reviewing the permissions of the files being produced by your build (I think it was the Contents directory inside the bundle that had the issue). You could switch to using the command line tools as suggested but I strongly suspect youā€™ll hit the same issues because as already mentioned itā€™s just a glorified wizard.

5

The ā€œPresentationā€ tab in Packages is not showing, as wavessequencer detailed in the link to the thread. And today, the windows close and donā€™t reopen right after I enter the name and save location for my package.
Iā€™ve not been able to get to the the build stage yet.

6

Use the build linked in this thread - that fixes the issue in packages in Sonoma:

Rail

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7

Iā€™ve been using this without issue:
https://github.com/KosalaHerath/macos-installer-builder

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8

I can confirm the issue I had with installed plugins appearing as folders was with the permissions on the build output of the XCode builds (because Iā€™d set my Mac home folder permissions to be more restrictive). I did use the unofficial build of ā€˜Packagesā€™ to get the presentation tab to appear correctly in Sonoma.
Iā€™m still thinking about alternative options for making installers on Mac as ā€˜Packagesā€™ might not be updated in future (and whilst source is available I donā€™t have time to figure it out if things need fixing) - so directly using the built in system tools might be a more future proof option.

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9

Itā€™s been a while but from memory once youā€™ve used packages to generate an installer you can use pkgutils to break the installer up again so you can package it with pkgbuild in future. SO it should be easy enough to break away from it if needs be.

10

Iā€™m almost there with a script inspired by Surge.
Its signing myplugin_AU.pkg fine but not the final mycompanyname-macOs-1.0.pkg, says the latter ā€œnot trustedā€. Which may or may not have something to do with the distriubtion.xml (?)

Its signs the final .dmg, and notarizes, staples it Ok.

I have to work out what to put in the ./SOURCE_DIR/resources/data and the ./SOURCE_DIR/scripts/installer_mac folder.
Iā€™m currently putting the Readme.rtf and the License.txt in the installer_mac folder, but its not building the xxx_resources.pkg.

I feel Iā€™m getting there, but for those things. Any ideas on the resources/data and the scripts/installer_mac fodlers?

11

In the end, I got this dev version of Packages working, and installing to the current user ~Library.

It would not sign my Developer ID Installer cert to the app within Packages despite adding it, so I had to do it in Terminal.

12

Signing and all the tabs work here on My MacBook M3 Max running Sonoma 14.4

Rail