Is There Any Way To Create An Installer For Mac
Apache cassandra for mac. Press Command+Space and type Terminal and press enter/return key.
The magical functionality necessary to create most packages is built right in to Terminal with the pkgbuild command, so there are no additional software licenses or costs.
Apple hasn’t shipped operating systems on physical media in a full decade, but there are still good reasons to want a reliable old USB stick for macOS Catalina. Luckily, it's not hard to make one—either with a handy graphical user interface or some light Terminal use. Here's what you need to get started:
- A Mac that you have administrator access to. We've created a USB stick from both Mojave and Catalina, but your experience with other versions may vary.
- A 16GB or larger USB flash drive or a 16GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. A USB 3.0 drive will make things significantly faster, but an older USB 2.0 drive will work in a pinch; 8GB drives worked for Mojave and older versions of macOS, but the Catalina installer is just a little too large to fit.
- The macOS 10.15 Catalina installer from the Mac App Store (in High Sierra or older macOS versions) or the Software Update preference pane in Mojave. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.
- If you want a GUI, take a look at Ben Slaney's Install Disk Creator from MacDaddy. There are other apps out there that do this, but this one is quick and simple.
If you want to use this USB installer with newer Macs as they are released, you'll want to periodically re-download new Catalina installers and make new install drives. Apple rolls support for newer hardware into new macOS point releases as they come out, so this will help keep your install drive as universal and versatile as possible.
There's also one new consideration for newer Macs with Apple's T2 controller chip—as of this writing, that list includes the iMac Pro, the 2018 Mac Mini, the 2018 MacBook Air, and 2018 and 2019 MacBook Pros, though Apple keeps an updated list here. Among this chip's many security features is one that disallows booting from external drives by default. To re-enable this feature, hold down Command-R while your Mac reboots to go into Recovery Mode and use the Startup Security Utility to 'allow booting from external media.' If you're trying to install an older version of macOS, you may also need to go from Full Security to Medium Security to enable booting, but if you're just trying to install the current version of macOS, the Full Security option should be just fine. And if you're just doing an upgrade install rather than a clean install, you can run the Catalina installer from the USB drive from within your current installation of macOS, no advanced tweaking required.
The easy way
Once you've obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and launch the Install Disk Creator. This app is basically just a GUI wrapper for the terminal command, so it should be possible to make install disks for versions of macOS going all the way back to Lion. In any case, it will work just fine for our purposes.
Install Disk Creator will automatically detect macOS installers on your drive and suggest one for you, displaying its icon along with its path. You can navigate to a different installer if you want, and you can also pick from all the storage devices and volumes currently connected to your Mac through the drop-down menu at the top of the window. Once you're ready to go, click 'Create Installer' and wait. A progress bar across the bottom of the app will tell you how far you have to go, and a pop-up notification will let you know when the process is done. This should only take a few minutes on a USB 3.0 flash drive in a modern Mac, though using USB 2.0 will slow things down.
The only slightly less-easy way
The Install Disk Creator is just a wrapper for the terminal command to create macOS install disks, so if you’re comfortable formatting your USB drive yourself and opening a Terminal window, it’s almost as easy to do it this way. Assuming that you have the macOS Catalina installer in your Applications folder and you have a Mac OS Extended (Journaled)-formatted USB drive (which is to say, HFS+ and notAPFS) named 'Untitled' mounted on the system, you can create a Catalina install drive using the following command.
sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled
The command will erase the disk and copy the install files over. Give it some time, and your volume will soon be loaded up with not just the macOS installer but also an external recovery partition that may come in handy if your hard drive dies and you're away from an Internet connection. If you would like to create an install drive for a macOS version other than Catalina, just tweak the paths above to refer to Mojave or High Sierra instead.
Whichever method you use, you should be able to boot from your new USB drive either by changing the default Startup Disk in System Preferences or by holding down the Option key at boot and selecting the drive. Once booted, you'll be able to install or upgrade Catalina as you normally would. You can also use Safari, Disk Utility, or Time Machine from the recovery partition to restore backups or troubleshoot.
By William Gallagher
Saturday, November 23, 2019, 03:23 pm PT (06:23 pm ET)
It doesn't seem that long since we were looking forward to the release of macOS El Capitan.
Apple really wants you to use macOS Catalina. And if that means you having to buy a new Mac, they'll find a way to manage their angst. Partly for this, and partly out of wanting to make it obvious to newcomers which is the current version of macOS, the company has long since hidden previous versions.
You've just not noticed because you've kept a handy copy of each one as you've upgraded over time. However, that pile of macOS installers you collected on that old external drive became worthless on October 24, 2019.
Any old macOS you have won't run anymore, because the security certificates on them expired then. However, any old macOS installer that you can download from Apple now will work.
And you can download them, you just have to know where to look —and that's also changed recently.
For some years, Apple kept the old installers for versions such as El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra in the App Store, but hid them. You wouldn't ever see them listed and you couldn't typically find them with a direct search, either. You had to read Apple's support documentation before you could get a link that would magically open up the installer in the App Store.
That's changing.
At present, you can still manage to get macOS Mojave, and High Sierra, if you follow these specific links to deep inside the App Store. For Sierra, El Capitan or Yosemite, Apple no longer provides links to the App Store.
If you again dig through the support documentation, though, there is still a way to get one of these particular old versions.
Don't be insane. But you can still find Apple operating systems back to 2005's Mac OS X Tiger if you really want to.
You could go even further back and get macOS versions as old as Tiger from 2005. We don't recommend it, and we have zero way to test whether it actually works. Nonetheless, in a corner of Apple's website that hasn't seen a lick of paint in a decade, there is still a page to let you download Mac OS X Tiger.
It's a fast download, too, because Tiger is around 340MB. Catalina, for comparison, is 4.5GB.
But first, why you'd bother
Don't get an old version of macOS because, say, you're short on drive space and that 340MB is appealing. (Modern Macs won't run the Tiger installer anyway, they report that it's from an unidentified developer. That could also be to do with the October 24 expiration, and if so, it's hard to see Apple bothering to do anything about an OS from nearly 15 years ago.)
Even with less prehistoric releases, don't do this at all unless you have to.
It's not that it's difficult or that it's somehow risky for your Mac, but it can be pointless. If your Mac is physically capable of running macOS Catalina, you're almost certainly better off updating it to that.
The only exception is when you are reliant on older 32-bit apps as those won't run on Catalina. In that case, update to Mojave.
While Apple supports Macs going back more years than seems feasible, there are still going to be plenty of machines that cannot ever update to Catalina. And that's fine because you're probably going to leave them on whatever they're currently running.
However, it's easy to end up with old Macs that are working fine, yet could be updated a little. Maybe not all the way to Catalina, but perhaps to High Sierra, maybe El Capitan, conceivably Mojave.
If you have High Sierra, you can sometimes see an update for it in the App Store. If you're on a later OS, though, you can't find it without being given the link.
Each new version of macOS that you can update to, you should. It is worth it for features, security and reliability.
And the more up to date you can possibly make your old Mac, the longer you will be able to get useful work out of it.
For instance, we recently revived a mid-2009 MacBook Pro to turn it into a second screen for our 2018 Mac mini using Luna Display's new Mac to Mac feature.
That app supports versions of macOS all the way back to 2015's El Capitan —but no further. Our old, half-broken MacBook Pro was running macOS Yosemite but fortunately, it was capable of running El Capitan.
We just had to find it.
How to find it
Choose from the following to get the official macOS update and directly from Apple.
In each case, Apple recommends that you first check which is the latest that your Mac can run, and then thoroughly, repeatedly, back up that Mac.
Apple also notes that you can't install a version of macOS on top of a later one. You can't go back. You can, if you really needed a hobby, wipe the Mac and start again installing that older macOS, but it's hard to conceive of a benefit to your doing so.
Craig Federighi introducing macOS El Captain back in 2015
Whereas it is easy to imagine needing to update an old machine to give it some more years of life.
And maybe Apple is keeping these old updaters tucked away, maybe your old collection is now worthless, but take some time and download them all now. Disk images you download now will last you until 2029.
Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.