create-dmg

Create a good-looking DMG for your macOS app in seconds

Imagine you have finished a macOS app, exported it from Xcode, and now want to distribute it to users. The most common way of distributing an app outside the Mac App Store is by putting it in a .dmg file. These are hard to create, especially good-looking ones. You can either pay for a GUI app where you have to customize an existing design or you can run some homebrewed Bash script and you still have to design it. This tool does everything for you, so you can play with your 🐈 instead.

Discuss it on Product Hunt and Twitter.

This tool is intentionally opinionated and simple. I'm not interested in adding lots of options.

You might also find my LaunchAtLogin project useful.

Install

Ensure you have Node.js 8 or later installed. Then run the following:

$ npm install --global create-dmg

Usage

$ create-dmg --help

  Usage
    $ create-dmg <app> [destination]

  Options
    --overwrite         Overwrite existing DMG with the same name
    --identity=<value>  Manually set code signing identity (automatic by default)
    --format            Set DMG format (default ULFO)

  Examples
    $ create-dmg 'Lungo.app'
    $ create-dmg 'Lungo.app' Build/Releases

DMG

The DMG requires macOS 10.11 or later with the default format and has the filename App Name 0.0.0.dmg, for example Lungo 1.0.0.dmg.

It will try to code sign the DMG, but the DMG is still created and fine even if the code signing fails, for example if you don't have a developer certificate.

DMG Icon

GraphicsMagick is required to create the custom DMG icon that's based on the app icon and the macOS mounted device icon.

Steps using Homebrew

$ brew install graphicsmagick imagemagick

Icon Example

Original icon → DMG icon

License

MIT © Sindre Sorhus