Creating a DNAStar Lasergene 13.x installer

As part of my day job, I support some medical research software packages that most Mac admins have likely never heard of. One of these software packages is DNAStar‘s Lasergene software suite. Up until now, this software used an Installer VISE installer, which required me to completely repackage the software for deployment. However, as of Lasergene 13.x, DNAStar has switched to using Bitrock’s InstallBuilder for the Lasergene installer. This tool does not produce standard installer packages, but InstallBuilder installer applications do support installation and uninstallation via the command line. That allows me to run an installation or uninstallation of the Lasergene suite by using the commands shown below:

To install a copy of DNAStar Lasergene which uses a network license server:

"/path/to/DNASTAR Lasergene Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh" --mode unattended

To install a copy of DNAStar Lasergene which uses an individual license code:

"/path/to/DNASTAR Lasergene Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh" --dnastarProductKey XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

To uninstall DNAStar Lasergene:

"/Applications/DNASTAR/Uninstall Lasergene 13.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh" --mode unattended

While this installation method is still not ideal, I can at least script it. That makes it an improvement over the hand-crafted installers I previously had to create for Lasergene.

Unfortunately, there is a quirk of Lasergene’s installation process which carries over from the Installer VISE days, which is that the Lasergene installer assumes that the account running the installation is going to be the owner of the application. So if you install Lasergene as your local admin, that may mean that your users aren’t able to run the Lasergene applications because they may not have permission to run the applications or access one or more of the application data files.

To address both the installation and permissions issues, I was able to create an installer using this method that handles both the installation and then fixing the permissions as a post-installation task. For more details, see below the jump.

Speaking at X World 2016

I’ll be speaking at X World 2016 in Sydney, Australia, where I’m planning to do a couple of sessions. This is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to Australia, so I’m looking forward to this opportunity to meet and learn from the Australian Mac admin community.

X World 2016 will be held at the University of Technology Sydney (Broadway City Campus) and is scheduled for the week of July 6th. Hope to see you there!