Apple Orchard is a set of scripts (bash & ruby) which run the

[Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef/)

recipes in [Pivotal Workstation](https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation)

in order to create OS X disk images which are deployed via

[DeployStudio](http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html).

Apple Orchard delivers a disk image which we can use to quickly (~20 minutes)

bring a freshly-unboxed OS X machine to a useful state.

In our case, we use it for our developer workstations. Our developers

use a variety of tools (IDEs such as RubyMine, editors such as vim and TextMate,

databases such as MySQL and PostgrSQL, applications such as Chrome and Skype).

When we give a developer a new machine, it is pre-loaded with those items.

Our process of building a developer workstation is encapsulated in a series

of Chef recipes (i.e. Pivotal Workstation). Apple Orchard pre-bakes those

recipes in a disk image. Installing the disk image is faster than running

the Chef recipes on each new workstation. Also, having a disk image spares the

developer from problems such as inaccessible download servers, stale URLs, etc.

The process is fairly automated. A typical workflow is as follows:

* A developer updates the TextMate recipe and pushes to Pivotal's pivotal_workstation repo on github

* An Apple Orchard Jenkins server detects that there has been an update to the repo and begins a build

* At the end of the build (assuming success), the resulting disk image, with the new TextMate, is copied to the DeployStudio server

If you're interested in setting it up yourself, please refer to the [wiki](https://github.com/pivotalexperimental/apple_orchard/wiki/)

You'll need the following:

1. A DeployStudio server

2. A [Jenkins](http://jenkins-ci.org/) server (can also be the same machine as the DeployStudio server)

3. An OS X build machine (it can be a virtual machine running under VMWare Fusion)

This process doesn't capture recovery partitions

(i.e. a newly-imaged machine won't have a recovery partition); however, this

is workable by creating a package which installs a recovery partition.

[This blogpost](http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/creating-an-updated-recovery-hd/)

has good information.

The build process will frequently fail, a success rate of 20% is good.

Failures can be caused by the DeployStudio share not mounted on boot by

the OS X machine's "Persistent" personality, by stale download URLs, by offline

download servers, by flawed gem dependencies, etc....

**apple_orchard** started as a side project of [Matthew

Kocher](https://github.com/mkocher) and [Brian

Cunnie](https://github.com/briancunnie) of Pivotal Labs in Summer 2011.