AutoPkg Integration for Mac OS X

I’ve been working on a set of Python tools to help integrate BigFix with the AutoPkg project (autopkg · GitHub) for OS X. This allows for the automatic creation and importing of software deployment tasks.

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Wow this is super cool!

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I guess one question I have is what the integration process was like. Did the REST API make this trivial, or was there something more you wish it did (or you wish Bigfix did)?

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The integration wasn’t difficult, it was just a matter of building a BES xml file based on the software recipe and pulling the information for relevance from the software installer.

I would say that BigFix is far from ideal when it comes to software deployment. Software installers on any platform are usually of a particular format or follow a standard, but using BigFix you are required to constantly repeat yourself in writing action script to perform the installation. This tool helps, but I’d still like to see more advanced software deployment tools from IBM.

Please contact me via email, I’d love to talk in more detail about this. I’m now the PM that covers Software Distribution.

nsalzman@us.ibm.com

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How many fixlets/tasks have you automatically generated using AutoPkgBESEngine? (Counting each software version separately)

Probably close to 1000 unique tasks generated over the past year of running it, with recipes for about 100 different of software packages. Obviously some software is updated much more frequently than others but I’ve found it to be useful even for software packages that rarely get updated.

All the recipes are stored in git repositories, which gives you easy version tracking, collaboration and everything else git offers. It is also easier to share content with other organizations because of the way AutoPkg is structured to allow for overriding and linking recipes together.

Just for further clarification, this means hansen_m created approximately 100 recipes for 100 different software packages that tell the AutoPkgBESEngine how to create BES Installation tasks for the software the recipe is for. When AutoPkg runs, it kicks off the creation of the installation task if and only if a new version exists. Over 1000 tasks for unique versions of these 100 different software packages were created with absolutely no effort outside of creating the recipes themselves. (and debugging them)

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