Allow running mas as portable or installing it

[undergroundwires]

Thanks for creating and maintaining awesome tool ❤️

I wonder if there's a way to download and run a separate version mas and then deleting it without affecting existing installation of mas. I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to do that or feedback about "potential feature requests" part of my issue.

Goal

I'd like to be able download a specific version of the tool and use it in an isolated way. I'd possibly mess up existing installation of mas if I use brew or install it on the default location by running the installer.

Potential feature requests

• Allow specification of installation path when I run installer -pkg './mas.pkg' -target "/i-want-mas-to-be-here/"
• Distribution of portable version of mas without requiring any installer.

Background/why

I'll add some tweaks in privacy.sexy to remove preinstalled applications. And I'd like to distribute mas (download and run it on users' computers) to reinstall the applications (as a revert logic to removing them).

[chris-araman]

#350, if accepted, might move mas in the direction of a single portable binary. There are some questions left to answer before that's resolved, but it seems feasible.

[chris-araman]

• Allow specification of installation path when I run `installer -pkg './mas.pkg' -target "/i-want-mas-to-be-here/"
• Distribution of portable version of mas without requiring any installer.

Both options should be adddressed by #350.

[undergroundwires]

Hi @chris-araman , thanks for resolving this. I have a few questions, I'd be very happy if I could get any answers.

Portable distributions

I tested and portable distributions work, thanks a lot! I shared some ideas about it #385 and would love to hear what you think.

Installer

I tried with sudo installer -pkg './mas.pkg' -target '/tmp/mas/' and it does not install it in the path of -target argument but on /.

which mas gives me /usr/local/bin/mas

pkgutil --pkg-info com.mphys.mas-cli gives me empty location:

package-id: com.mphys.mas-cli
version: 1.8.2
volume: /
location: 
install-time: 1621365685

pkgutil --only-files --files com.mphys.mas-cli gives me

usr/local/._bin
usr/local/bin/mas

I don't know why it's not working 🙁 I tried to find cause of this and debug the code but I really don't know my way around pkg's in macOS. I've been checking scripts and distribution file and they look good in my eyes.

Can it be customLocation (defaulting to /) that would be required in Distribution.plist? According to the Apple documentation:

Optional. Specifies the default installation location, within the installation volume, for this choice. Implies that the user can choose a different installation location. If unspecified, the user cannot choose the installation location for this choice.

Or maybe I'm wrong completely wrong here and pkg simply don't allow setting a path (anything except volume) as install location.

[chris-araman]

@undergroundwires, I don't think the .pkg is meant to do what you're trying to do. The target path is only a prefix to the installed binary's relative path usr/local/bin/mas. For instance, if you want to install to prefix /opt/mySpecialPackageManager, the absolute path to the binary would be /opt/mySpecialPackageManager/usr/local/bin/mas.

which mas gives me /usr/local/bin/mas

That will depend on your PATH. Was /tmp/mas/usr/local/bin in your PATH?

The .bottle.tar.gz files in the 1.8.2 release are meant for the custom Homebrew tap, not general use by end users. That said, because of the way mas is built now, extracting the mas binary from those packages should allow for the portability you're looking for.

As before, the preferred way to install mas is via a package manager like Homebrew:
brew install mas