How to make a Mac OS X .app with a shell script?

Question

I tried following a few tutorials, but I get this:

How can I fix this? I added in a info.plist (I just copied and pasted another app's file, and changed around a few things.)

Also, I used chmod +x myApp to make the script executable.

P.S. I am using El Capitan

Answer 1

Well, it's been years I use this simple trick to have bash scripts in application (and really really don't understand why all people try so complicated solutions as creating "Contents" folders, info.plist or use Automator or Platypus or so... ????).

1. Create a folder named "YourApplication.app". It can be created at any location that is convenient to your usage. Though, the most OS compliant locations may be /Applications or your own ~/Applications folder.
2. Put your script file directly in this folder the way that suites you the best (Finder, terminal etc). The script must be executable of course (use chmod +x if you need). No need for other folders or file (until you need to call other scripts or executable from within your script of course) The trick is to name your script with exactly the same name as the application folder but without extension. In the case described here the script file must be named "YourApplication".

That's all ! It works on Mac os x since Snow Leopard to Mavericks. If anybody can try on newer OS versions and tell me.

Note: The script must be at least 28 bytes in size, otherwise it will not execute. It may be padded with blank lines to achieve minimum size. Also, the first line of the script must be a shebang; e.g. #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/perl.

[UPDATE]

Answering what @DenisHowe's comment is addressing, when using this trick, if you want to have the path of the current execution, you can add those lines at the beginning of the script :

abspath () 
{ 
case "${1}" in 
    [./]*)
    local ABSPATH="$(cd ${1%/*}; pwd)/"
    echo "${ABSPATH/\/\///}"
    ;;
    *)
    echo "${PWD}/"
    ;;
esac
}


CURRENTPATH=`abspath ${0}`
PATH=$PATH:$CURRENTPATH

Answer 2

The currently accepted answer does not quite work for me. I get the little broken application icon.

The following works for me under OSX 10.15.7 (Catalina). You can feel free to change the YourApplication in all of the following instructions to be the name you really want.

1. mkdir a directory with the .app extension in the /Applications folder with a Contents and then MacOS subdirectories.

   mkdir -p /Applications/YourApplication.app/Contents/MacOS
   

2. Move your script into this directory and name it the same as the top application folder but without the .app extension and without the shell script extension:

   mv yourscript.sh /Applications/YourApplication.app/Contents/MacOS/YourApplication
   

3. Make sure your script is executable:

   chmod +x /Applications/YourApplication.app/Contents/MacOS/YourApplication
   

Here's a sample application to try:

#!/bin/sh
result=`osascript -e 'display dialog "Should I beep?" buttons {"Yes", "No"}'`
if [[ "$result" = "button returned:Yes" ]]; then
    osascript -e 'beep'
fi

Your application should now be ready and the script should run when you double click on it. It's important to note that if you rename the application, you will need to rename the underlying script.

---

To have your application seen by LaunchPad was harder to figure out. The following seemed to work. You need to add something like the following into the /Applications/YourApplication.app/Contents/Info.plist file. You might also need to move it over to a DMG file and back to Applications for LaunchPad to notice it. See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/71342335/179850

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
    <string>My App</string>
    <key>CFBundleGetInfoString</key>
    <string>My App 1.0</string>
    <key>CFBundleVersion</key>
    <string>1.0</string>
    <key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key>
    <string>1.0</string>
</dict>
</plist>

---

To add an icon to your new application, you need to do the following:

1. Find or create a PNG that you want to be your icon.

2. Open the image in the Preview application – other graphics apps may also work.

3. Press command-a to select all and then command-c to copy it to the clipboard.

4. Select your application in the Finder and press command-i to Get Info window.

5. Click on the icon in the upper left corner of the info window to select it:

   

6. Paste the image from the clipboard which should change the icon.

   

You can also open up the Get Info window on other application, select it's icon, and copy it so you can paste it onto your new application. After you assign any icon, if you look in your .app directory, you should see a filename that starts with Icon.

Answer 3

If it is a simple shell script, then you don't need to wrap it in an application bundle; you can double-click the script itself. However, you won't get the ability to have a custom icon or other things like that.

I think there are a few helpers out there that can wrap simple scripts, but the only one that I have experience with is Platypus which allows you to make shell/python/perl/ruby/etc scripts run like regular applications with icons, I/O redirections, etc.

Where Platypus differs here is that you CAN get STDIN / STDOUT through a few different mechanisms, as well as menu bar interactivity. So you get a window where you can interact with whatever script is actually running.

Answer 4

Platypus appears not to be useable from the command line (which is likely where your shell script is).

This script https://github.com/andrewp-as-is/mac-appify which can be installed with pip for python users (pip install mac-appify) appears to carry out the steps in the answer above.

It can be useful like so

pip install mac-appify
appify script.sh  /Applications/$NAME.app

Answer 5

The answer from Gray mostly worked for me, but on an ARM64 Mac, it kept prompting me to install Rosetta.

Adding the LSArchitecturePriority to the /Contents/Info.plist seems to fix this, as MacOS assumes the script is Intel only by default:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
    <string>run</string>
    <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
    <string>com.testing</string>
    <key>LSArchitecturePriority</key>
    <array>
        <string>arm64</string>
    </array>
    <key>LSRequiresNativeExecution</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Also, this is cached somehow, and for some reason changing the CFBundleIdentifier to something else got Rosetta to check again.