Previously, I showed how to install Luggage, and how to package a drag and drop app.  In this installment, we will look at how to package up a LaunchAgent script.

We will work with a simple script to mount a couple of file shares when a user logs into their computer.  To set it up as a LaunchAgent, we need two pieces.  First, the script itself (connectshares.sh) needs to be copied to /Library/Scripts/Myorg and everyone should have read and execute permissions.  Second, a plist (com.myorg.connectshares.plist) file which controls the execution of the script needs to be copied to /Library/LaunchAgents and and everyone should have read permissions. Continue reading →

In a previous post, I showed how to get started by getting Luggage setup.  In this post we will create a simple package based on a .app bundle.

Drag and drop applications are really user friendly to install, the user simply needs to drag them to the Applications folder.  They are not as nice, however, for the system administrator who wishes to deploy the application via some automated tool.  In some cases it is desirable to repackage these application into an installer package.  Fortunately this is easy to do with the Luggage.

For this demonstration, I will use my favorite text editor TextWrangler.app.  When we download TextWrangler it is downloaded as a disk image.  Mount the image file by double clicking on it, and we see that we have an app bundle and a link to the Applications folder.  The application bundles are actually a special directory, so our first step is to make a compressed tar of the app. Continue reading →

When administering and or deploying Mac OS systems, it becomes very useful to be able to create packages.  This can be to repackage an app to automate deployment, or package up scripts or configuration files.  One such tool to do this is The Luggage.  Written by Joe Block, it is a command line tool that makes use of Apple’s Packagemaker as well as Make.  More information can be found here.

This post is intended to walk you through getting up and running with luggage from ground zero.  A future post will look at using The Luggage.  This tutorial is assuming you are running Mac OS 10.7. Continue reading →