Why this guide?

Okay, this isn’t terribly groundbreaking stuff for seasoned Mac Admins, but for the beginners and intermediates among us, I’m trying to write the layperson’s guide to Outset.

What is Outset?

Outset is basically a set of launch daemons (to run at boot) and launch agents (to run at user login) that will run a bunch of scripts placed in a variety of folders.

Without Outset (or something like it), if you had run-at-boot scripts and run-at-login scripts, you would have to make separate launch daemons and launch agents, respectively, for each script (and then write logging into each script).

With Outset, all you have to do is put the scripts in the right folders, and they’ll run without their own individual launch daemons / agents, and their runs will be logged without you scripting the logging for each individual one.

How do you use Outset?

Download the latest Outset release and install the .pkg on a test client.

You should see within the /usr/local/outset directory, a series of folders. Scripts you put in these subfolders…

• boot-once
• boot-every
• login-once
• login-every
• on-demand

… will run based on what type of folder you put the scripts in. For example, if you want a script to run every time the computer boots up, put the script in boot-every. If you want a script to run every time a user logs in, put the script in login-every.

Apparently, at one time, the scripts had to have specific extensions in order to be run. Now they can be any extension (or no extension), as long as they’re executable. And the permissions on (these root-owned) scripts should be 755 (the permissions on .pkg files should be 644).

You can then use something like Packages to create several .pkg files to distribute out payloads of scripts to those folders. And, if you’re using Munki, you can make each .pkg require Outset.

You can find logs in /var/log/outset.log (for boot- scripts) and ~/Library/Logs/outset.log (for login- scripts).