Composer issue

[icejoran]

Hi all,

I'm trying to build a pkg with a virtualbox VM for my users. Everything seems to go well when i build it following the usual steps; Composer -> new -> 'Monitor File System Changes' -> Dropping 'Virtual Box VMs' dir in my home folder -> build. Everything seems to go well. Composer is building the package for several minutes.

But i end up with a 68k .pkg file which has basically empty files in it. Everything together is should be 13G.

Is there anything i could have missed or done wrong in the process?

Help is greatly appreciated!

[mm2270]

@icejoran Any particular reason you're using Monitor File System Changes for this? If you know exactly what files you're looking to package up, you can just put them into place on your Mac like normal, then open Composer and drag them into the Composer side bar and it will copy those VM files in along with the directory structure they're in. There shouldn't be a need to do any file system monitoring or snapshot type stuff for this.

[icejoran]

@mm2270: thanks for your suggestion, i tried it that way and unfortunately still the same result.
Is it possible that composer doesn't handle virtual box files well, or something with big files?

[icejoran]

We're getting closer to the core of the problem, when i build a pkg manually via the terminal, using pkgbuild i get an error about the size of the files which are too large. Is anyone aware of a limit in pkg's in gereneral and how to change limits?

[tuinte]

We have packages in the 25 GB neighbourhood, so you shouldn't be running into any size limits.

I just tried dropping my Virtual Box VMs folder into the sidebar (same way @mm2270 suggested) and built it as a DMG just fine (11 GB). Maybe try building as DMG? I'll try building as a PKG now to see if it does anything different.

(I'm using Composer 9.72)

EDIT: Interesting. Building as PKG had the same result you were getting. Took a minute or two to build, and was left with a 3 MB pkg. Not sure why that's happening, but, as I said, building as DMG seems to work. But ya, using Snapshot or Monitor File System Changes shouldn't be required.

[ktappe]

PKG has an 8GB size limit. See my post about this here.

Also, I like to put shared VM's in /Users/Shared. That way when another user logs in (or you log in as admin), they have access to the VM.

And as others have said, monitoring file system changes is a longer way around to your destination. Just drop the VM container into the Composer payload area, highlight it, make any changes you want to, and save as DMG.

[bentoms]

Yep, drag & drop!

Composers snapshotting is handy for troubleshooting, but don't use it to create every package.

[cdenesha]

My first few readings of this thread gave me the impression that PKGs themselves couldn't be larger than 8 GB (missed comment by tuinte).

I see now that it is each file in the PKG that has to be smaller than this. This link was helpful.

[pfarricker]

I usually do my Composer packing within a VM [10.11.12] (for scenarios when I am creating screenshots so not too many things are running in the background like my main machine).. while attempting to package up some VM's that I was interested in putting into Self Service to download, I kept running into the issue where my 10+ GB VM image was quickly made into a 200-300 KB .pkg or .dmg. I have since retried this while NOT inside of my VM, and now seems to function normally. Thought I would pass along.