I’ve just released a new command line tool, dmgbuild, that automates the creation of (nice looking) disk images from the command line. There are no GUI tools necessary; there is no AppleScript, and it doesn’t rely on Finder, or on any deprecated APIs.

Why use this approach? Well, because everything about your disk image is defined in a plain text file, you’ll get the same results every time; not only that, but the resulting image will be the same no matter what version of Mac OS X you build it on.

If you’re interested, the Python package is up on PyPI, so you can just do

pip install dmgbuild

to get the program (if you don’t have pip, do easy_install pip first; or download it from PyPI, extract it, then run python setup.py install). You can also read the documentation, or see the code.

It’s really easy to use; all you need do is make a settings file (see the documentation for an example) then from the command line enter something like

dmgbuild -s my-settings.py "My Disk Image" output.dmg

The code for editing .DS_Store files and for generating Mac aliases has been split out into two other modules, ds_store and mac_alias, for those who are interested in such things. The ds_store module should be fully portable to other platforms; the mac_alias module relies on some OS X specific functions to fill out a proper alias record, and on other systems those would need to be replaced somehow. The dmgbuild tool itself relies on hdiutil and SetFile, so will only work on Mac OS X.