SPSS

Good news! As of SPSS 27 IBM is finally shipping an Apple installer package for macOS instead of their Java based silent installer. Looking at the installer, it has a few minor issues but is for the most part sane. The package can be imported into Munki without much fuss. As in the past, activation will need to be scripted post install to license SPSS. The format of the path to the application has changed a bit, my postinstall script now looks like :

I previously wrote about a script to license SPSS for Mac silently . In version 25 of SPSS Statistics, the path to the bundled Java has changed. It now no longer has the version of the JRE in the path. As a result the script now looks like this : #!/bin/bash -x VERSION=25 AUTHCODE=<redacted> APPPATH="/Applications/IBM/SPSS/Statistics/$VERSION/SPSSStatistics.app/" cd "$APPPATH/Contents/bin" "$APPPATH/Contents/JRE/bin/java" -jar "$APPPATH/Contents/bin/licenseactivator.jar" SILENTMODE CODES=$AUTHCODE If SPSS keeps a consistent path to the bundled Java, it will make it a little bit easier to update the script for each new version of SPSS Statistics.

I previously posted a method for scripting the activation of SPSS Statistics 23. My method has changed for version 24, so I thought it would be a good idea to write up my notes. First up, repackaging. Due to the SPSS silent installer being notoriously bad, I had already decided I would just repackage version 24 and use a postinstall script to activate. It really is the best way to ensure that it will deploy properly.

It’s not hard to find discussions online about installing SPSS silently. I have a working install based on this discussion . I needed to re-license a number of machines with a new authorization code and had a bit of trouble, so I thought I’d write it up… I built a payload free package with The Luggage to distribute with Munki, and my first attempt at the postinstall script looked like this :