What does HackerNews think of munki?

Managed software installation for macOS —

Language: Python

There's a decent open source option: https://github.com/munki/munki

I got to use it at work at Meta (as end user), and it seemed to work quite well. They delivered Android SDKs/IDEs and a bunch of other things that I'd personally install through Brew with Munki.

The DIY style management software for OS X/macOS[1][2] is interesting. I knew commercial packages existed for this sort of thing (and more), but I'm fascinated that Disney admins & engineers chose to implement their own Software Update Servers.

[1]https://github.com/munki/munki [2]https://github.com/wdas/reposado

Author of AutoDMG here, and since imaging is my day job I was happy to see that the article starts with a solid introduction to deploying OS X. However I'd do a few things differently:

* It's best to build the image using a full installer of the latest version of OS X downloaded from the App Store (currently 10.10.5 14F27). Do not build a 10.10 14A389 image and apply the combo update to it as updates are meant to be installed on live systems and occasionally causes headaches.

* Avoid including extra packages on the image, it'll only make it a pain to maintain and update. Also many packages are badly written and don't install correctly (see https://github.com/MagerValp/AutoDMG/wiki/Packages-Suitable-...).

* Rather than installing packages into the image you can include them but install them on first boot, e.g. with Outset: https://github.com/chilcote/outset

* Even better, it's easy to set up Munki for software management, this way you can keep your machines updated too: https://github.com/munki/munki

* If you build your image with AutoDMG a recovery partition should be included in the image and created automatically when you restore with asr. If for some reason it's missing you can create a package that will create it for you (again using the latest OS X installer): https://github.com/MagerValp/Create-Recovery-Partition-Insta...

Now on to reading the rest of the guide... :)

Edit: reworded