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"Why an installer when installing a macOS app is as simple as dragging and dropping into a folder”, you ask? Well, because this is for a macOS login/authorization plugin …
At this point, most people will probably go “Huh?” and I don’t blame you, because this is a dark corner of macOS coding that most probably don’t venture into
A macOS login plugin allows you to customise the macOS login flow so that you can add your own layer of authorization/security or carry out some specific tasks that need to happen during the login process.
Unofrtunately, none of that is very well documented. In fact, I spent months scouring the Internet and going through documentation to get our implementation of a macOS login plugin working correctly.
In fact, somebody at work said that I was one of possibly 10 people in the world who understood this stuff. Honestly, I don’t believe that since I think that if I could figure it out, anybody else could too since the information is all out there
Whatever the case, our login plugin requires particular authorization rules to be set and what most people seem to do is to use a shell script to do this since that’s fairly widely documented. But in our case, while that’s the option we are using now, I want to actually do this via code because it simplifies a few logistical issues.
So here I am, exploring the macOS documentation again to see how you can do what I want to do in Swift and finding that this is not very well documented at all
I do wish that the Apple documentation was excellent throughout instead of being very informative for the areas that everybody is interested in and then getting rather opaque, terse, or downright non-existent for the areas that people don’t venture into often. But I guess that’s how it works out — afterall, why bother spending the time on documenting something that not many people will use?
#Coding #Apple #macOS #Authorization #Documentation #Security #Login #Swift
This was more of a reflection (after the fact) on how difficult it is to find info about certain areas of macOS development ….@f @trode His advice is still good advice, though
Many of the tools that exist in this space (Crypt2, NoMAD Login, etc) were built by Mac admins
Swapping out/adding authorization mechanisms isn't something 99.999+% of macOS developers would ever want to know how to do - but it's very relevant in edu/gov/enterprise
Many of the programming admins in that Slack are more familiar with these edges of the OS than most 
I didn’t know of the #macadmin Slack before now but will probably lurk there now
@f @mikeymikey No worries Fahim! The slack is a good one with channels on specific topic. Excellent community for sure! @mikeymikey is always good for some practical advice as well!
@trode @f In this space, specifically, I'd defer to @mactroll, @macshome, and @tperfitt as friends most familiar on this very topic though
But yes - check out the Slack. Even if nobody is actively talking about what you're looking for (though at 58k+ members - that's increasingly unlikely), there's a good chance you may hit gold in the search history.
(And we always love a challenge!)
@trodeThe particular issue I was working on is solved now — it wasn’t that hard of an issue to begin with, just that most of the documentation I could find pointed to the “security” tool rather than how to do it in Swift
But the Slack looks like a great resource! And of course, as you suggested, search history is almost always a great place to find an answer since somebody probably has run into the same issue previously — generally the issue is finding the right place to search and it looks as if the Slack will be the right place for my particular needs …