Idea here is to use packer and startosinstall to perform an automated installation of macOS in a VM. It requires VMware Fusion.
Run prepare_iso to create a new installer VMDK. This relies a tool that's bundled with VMware Fusion:
./prepare_iso /path/to/a/10.15.3/installer/app installer_10.15.3.vmdk
Run create_bootstrap_pkg.sh to generate a post-install package that we'll eventually pass to the macOS installer:
./create_bootstrap_pkg.sh
Now we can run packer to build it, passing our installer VMDK as a variable:
packer build -var iso_url=installer_10.15.3.vmdk packer.json
See the variables section of packer.json for more configuration options. Notably, there's an option to disable SIP.
You may want to set the PACKER_LOG=info or PACKER_LOG=debug environment variables if you're hacking on this and debugging connectivity/sequence issues with Packer.
- Fix the issue where we currently need to manually hack the installer path in
vmx.gotmpl(seesata0:1.fileName) - Add back a configuration profile or other means to disable Setup Assistant things, auto-login, and other updated items from osx-vm-templates, etc.
- Explain more about how this works
- Document why we use a .gotmpl for the VMX configuration, why packer's existing VMX configuration options weren't sufficient.