Best practice for packaged deployment of Xcode 10?

Andrew_Rogers
New Contributor II

Hello all

I am fairly new to packaging, but I know the basics and have managed to tackle some simple stuff in the past. I usually use Packages.app or Terminal as snapshot with Composer just yields poor results in my experience. I need to deploy Xcode 10 to devs in my environment. The Mac App store is completely blocked and we enforce an AlwaysOn VPN profile that blocks network traffic unless on the corporate network. This means Xcode is going to have to come from me, not Apple or the App Store.

Packaging the app was not hard at all. However, when I install the package on my test machine, the install takes almost 2 hours! This is a completely vanilla package, nothing added. Just needs to put Xcode.app into /Applications. I cannot fathom why it would take that long and I have little faith that Self Service is going to be able to manage that install without timing out or just failing. I get that the app is almost 8GB but that still seems nuts.

So, with all that in mind, what are your suggestions as to how I can deploy this more reliably? I really just need the "install" to work as quickly as possible. I had planned to deploy a two phase install with phase one silently caching the package and phase two just being a self service button to run the package.

Any thoughts or advice welcome! Thanks in advance!

1 REPLY 1

Brett
New Contributor II

It could be Gatekeeper verification that is causing the delay. Take a look at @RobertHammen's postinstall script https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/26615/xcode-9-2-deployment#responseChild158119 for the commands in context.