Autopkg and Selenium

[John Lockwood]

Selenium is a tool for automating actions in web browsers.

We want to deploy this to a number of Macs which will act as dashboard displays in the office. This is easy enough doing it via Terminal or a script, it is normally installed via HomeBrew.

However I would like if possible to do this via Autopkg and Munki so that Munki is set to 'require' Homebrew for Selenium and therefore first installs Homebrew and then via Homebrew installs Selenium. (It would be the Selenium CLI we would be mainly using.)

Ideally Autopkg and Munki would keep both HomeBrew and Selenium updated but if it cannot do that I can live with that.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this via Autopkg recipes or purely in Munki e.g. payload free pkg?

[Nick McSpadden]

My suggestion would be to not use homebrew at all for this. Selenium hosts Webdriver downloads for all the main browsers:
https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/getting_started/install_drivers/

And depending on which language you want to use, you can download the relevant jar file that way. 

You can craft your own download recipe to download the specific relevant files you need, and then write a .pkg recipe to wrap that up into an Apple package (or a dmg, depending on how you want to do it), and then a .munki recipe to throw it into your repo.

Generally speaking, this will be more reliable, more deterministic, and less failure prone than homebrew on multiple machines. You have one process to manage the entire construction, the package will work the same everywhere, and only one point of failure. Homebrew everywhere and a payload free package to trigger it will introduce every client as a potential failure for any reason, and that will significantly magnify the complexity of the operation.

If you do want to go down the path of using homebrew, you probably don't need autopkg for this particular thing.

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Nick McSpadden
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