Silent Installation method?

[grahampugh]

Hi all,
I'm responsible for deploying apps to managed macOS devices, and this requires a method of installing apps silently. I've been playing around with the Dataloader installer, but I haven't found a non-interactive method of creating the application.

I have tried this:

• Install a recent JRE
• Remove the quarantine bit from the downloaded installer - xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0.zip
• unzip the downloaded installer - unzip /path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0.zip
• Run install.command - /path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0/install.command

This results in interactive prompts.

I tried running /path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0/install.command --help but it seems there is no help sheet.

I tried feeding in the prompt values with a heredoc or echo command, but this didn't work, e.g.

/path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0/install.command <<EOF
n
/Applications/Dataloader
y
n
n
EOF

It DID work using an expect file, as follows (yep, generated by an LLM):

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
# Set a timeout (in seconds) — increase if needed for slow installers
set timeout -1

# Start the installer
spawn /path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0/install.command

# First question
expect "Do you want to install Data Loader in the current folder"
send "n\r"

# Folder input
expect "Provide the installation folder"
send "/Applications/Dataloader\r"

# Desktop shortcut
expect "Do you want to create a Desktop shortcut"
send "n\r"

# Applications shortcut
expect "Do you want to create a shortcut in Applications folder"
send "y\r"

# Final prompt — just press Enter
expect "Press <Enter> key to continue"
send "\r"

# Let user interact if anything unexpected appears
interact

I just wanted to know if there was a more elegant solution for getting this deployed at scale? For one thing, if there are any variations, like trying to overwrite an existing installation, then the questions change and the expect file will fail.

[ashitsalesforce]

Hi @grahampugh , try specifying the installation folder as the value of salesforce.installation.dir command line option to install.bat script. It will execute install.bat in non-interactive mode.

[grahampugh]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I'm struggling a bit with the syntax of install.bat. The default file looks like this:

:; #!/bin/sh #
:; #
:; DL_INSTALL_ROOT="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd -P)" #
:; . "${DL_INSTALL_ROOT}/util/util.sh" #
:; runDataLoader run.mode=install "$@" #
:; exit $? #

@echo off
CALL "%~dp0util\util.bat" :runDataLoader run.mode=install %*

I attempted to amend that last line as follows, but it didn't make any difference:

CALL "%~dp0util\util.bat" :runDataLoader run.mode=install salesforce.installation.dir=/Applications/Dataloader %*

[grahampugh]

Oh, found it! Thanks for the hint in the right direction. I was able to amend the last line in /path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0/util/util.sh to the following, and then it worked without interaction:

    java --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED -cp "${SCRIPT_DIR}/*" com.salesforce.dataloader.process.DataLoaderRunner salesforce.installation.dir=/Applications/Dataloader "$@"

[grahampugh]

Even better, this works directly from the comand line!

/path/to/dataloader_v64.1.0/install.command salesforce.installation.dir=/Applications/Dataloader