Install shellcheck binary on macOS (updated)

A few months back I wrote a post on how to compile and build an installer for the shellcheck binary for macOS.

Just a few weeks later, the shellcheck project added a download for a pre-compiled binary for macOS. You can now download the binary with this link:

https://shellcheck.storage.googleapis.com/shellcheck-latest.darwin.x86_64.tar.xz

Ironically, macOS can unarchive xz archives when you double click them in the Finder, but there is no command line tool on macOS to unarchive them. In the previous post, I ran into the same problem, and there you can find instructions on how to install the xz tools on macOS.

Update 2020-03-26: I was unnecessarily complicating this. You can use tar to unarchive this:

tar -xf shellcheck-latest.darwin.x86_64.tar.xz

After downloading and un-archiving, you can manually move the shellcheck binary to a suitable directory. The standard location is /usr/local/bin.

For manual installations, this is it! Much simpler than before. Thank you!

Note: if you want the man page as well, you still need to build it with pandoc from the source.

Build a pkg for managed deployment

If you are a MacAdmin and want to distribute shellcheck with your management system, you will need to build an installer package (pkg).

Instead of copying the binary to /usr/local/bin, place it in a payload folder in a project folder. Then build the pkg with pkgbuild:

% mkdir -p ShellcheckPkg/payload
% cp ~/Downloads/shellcheck-latest/shellcheck ShellcheckPkg/payload
% pkgbuild --root ShellcheckPkg/payload --identifier com.example.shellcheck --version 0.7.0 --install-location /usr/local/bin shellcheck-0.7.0.pkg

Replace the 0.7.0 with the actual version number.

Automated Package creation with autopkg

And because all of this isn’t really that difficult, I built autopkg recipes for Shellcheck You can find them in my recipe repository or with autopkg search shellcheck. Enjoy!