This is a relatively stupid problem that took me a few seconds to figure out, but I figured I would post on it anyway. I have recently been working with createosxinstallpkg, part of the tool set included to administer Munki, an open source managed software update server (and client) for OS X machines.

I used createosxinstallpkg last year when I needed to build a never-booted upgrade package to for 10.7 clients to upgrade to 10.8.2, which was being certified in our enterprise environment at the time. Despite the fact that OS X Mavericks 10.9 is offered to users as a free upgrade, we have several users who feel more comfortable letting IT perform the work, so I use createosxinstallpkg to create the never-booted upgrade package our techs use to perform the “supervised” upgrades.

In our environment, we have a proxy server for all outgoing traffic to the public internet. I noticed that during the process to check against Apple’s software update catalog for the location of the incompatible applications package file, that the createosxinstallpkg job was failing after not being able to hit swscan.apple.com:443 and ultimately timing out. After some inspection of the createosxinstallpkg source code, I saw that the python script is actually performing a curl against the software update catalog and subsequent location to find the incompatible applications package. I knew that I was going to have to specify to curl that I was behind a proxy, either by editing the source or by providing environment variables. When I chose to just specify the environment variables, I used the command:

export https_proxy=https://internet.proxyserver.mycompany.com:3128/

Soon after entering and having the package creation fail again, I realized I did not correctly specify my credentials to authenticate to our proxy server for https traffic. I edited my command and subsequent environment variable per below:

export https_proxy=https://username:password@internet.proxyserver.mycompany.com:3128/

Great, now my syntax is working for me–I’m going to be golden 🏆. Then I realized I was editing environment variables for curl to use on my local administrator’s environment variable file. Since createosxinstallpkg runs as the root user, I needed to make this change to the root user’s environment variable instead.

Once I realized the err of my ways, and made the correct environment variable edit for the root user, createosxinstallpkg was able to successfully communicate for its files. Silly problem, but I wanted to document it anyway in case someone starts banging their head like I did for a second.

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