As part of preparing my Casper server for its eventual upgrade to Casper 9.x, I’m transitioning from using bundle-style packages to using flat packages wherever possible.
As part of that effort, I needed to repackage a few versions of Firefox that I have made available in my shop’s Self Service. I was able to do this with the help of AutoPkg’s Firefox receipe. See below the jump for details.
In my own shop, I usually have the following Firefox installers available in Self Service:
- The latest version of Firefox
- The just-previous version of Firefox (in case of an issue with the latest version)
- Firefox 16 (the latest version of Firefox that runs on Mac OS X 10.5.8.)
Needless to say, I built my Firefox 16 installer a while ago and it was a bundle-style package. I also wanted to automate building my Firefox installers.
AutoPkg came to the rescue; specifically AutoPkg recipe overrides. In this case, the overrides are functions built into the Mozilla Firefox recipes themselves that will help you build an installer package that installs the Firefox version you want.
You can specify which version of Firefox you want to use. For example, if you have AutoPkg installed and have the Firefox recipe, run the following command to build a Firefox 16.0.2 installer package:
autopkg run --key RELEASE=16.0.2 Firefox.pkg
If you want to build other versions, specify their version numbers when you run AutoPkg:
Firefox 22.0:
autopkg run --key RELEASE=22.0 Firefox.pkg
Firefox 24.0:
autopkg run --key RELEASE=24.0 Firefox.pkg
Firefox 25.0:
autopkg run --key RELEASE=25.0 Firefox.pkg
If you want to get the latest available without worrying about the version number, run the following command to build an installer package with the latest released version of Firefox:
autopkg run --key RELEASE=latest Firefox.pkg
If your shop uses Firefox ESR instead of the regular releases, run the following command to build an installer package with the latest ESR version of Firefox:
autopkg run --key RELEASE=latest-esr Firefox.pkg
The AutoPkg Firefox recipes are using http://download-origin.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ as their source, so I recommend checking there if you need more information on which releases can be built with AutoPKG using the RELEASE key.
