How can I install the macOS ZitiDesktop without the App Store?

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Hi there, and greetings from Anchorage Alaska!

I am brand new to OpenZiti, and I am hoping I can find a good use case for my business. However, I ran into my first big issue, the Mac App Store. We have the app store locked down and out… no access. All installs are done by Ansible or the rare pointy-clicky installer.pkg.

Does anyone have a link to an installer, or an Ansible playbook (or any other IaC tool) that you can share with me? I’m totally stuck testing this on my Mac lab systems.

Thanks!

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Greetings to you in Anchorage! Welcome to OpenZiti and to the community!

The ziti-edge-tunnel binary can be found in GitHub at Release v0.21.5 · openziti/ziti-tunnel-sdk-c · GitHub. I am pretty sure that it works just fine standalone on MacOS, but I run the app store version. It doesn’t have an installer, you just curl/wget/download it and run it.

We don’t have an Ansible playbook for MacOS. There are other community members contributing to the Ansible collection repo. Maybe there’s something in there that can help you out?

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Thanks for the quick response!

Edit: I see it’s the binary only. I would later need the UI that the end user would interact with. Is there an installer for that as well? I will get started with the tunnel app, but I really need the macOS Desktop app to do my testing.

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Yeah, it’s a binary only and doesn’t have an associated UI. The Ziti Desktop Edge for MacOS (ZDEM), as far as I know, is only available from the app store. I don’t know what it would take to build a separate installer.

The ZDEM is based on the same code that the ziti-edge-tunnel runs for much of the core functionality but the UI and other parts are built with apple libraries. The ecosystem is admittedly a bit of a mystery to me. I expect we’ll need to get @smilindave26 to comment to know if this is even a possibility.

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I tried tarring up the *.app folder and moving it to another system and that seemed to work. I haven’t done a deep dive to see if there are any processes that run during the install… but the app starts. The Intel app ran on the M1; I didn’t try the other way around. But they don’t hash the same. Maybe I will get lucky, and this is all I need for now.

tar -cf ~/ziti.app-intel.tar /Applications/Ziti*.app #from an intel mac
tar -cf ~/ziti.app-arm.tar /Applications/Ziti*.app #from arm mac
md5 ~/ziti.app-*.tar
#output
  MD5 (~/ziti.app-arm.tar) = 1e22f6a02a9763e1722b8b6639f7d9f3
  MD5 (~/ziti.app-intel.tar) = 769329d6856d00b231d127c4f8fd6eb3
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