Coverting a .pkg to a .dmg on MAC

Installing files without using the installer.

Photo by Austin Schmid on Unsplash

If we have a managed computer, we may not be able to install a file directly using the installer since this requires access to Applications root folder.

DMG

For a DMG file, we can create a secondary “Applications” directory in our $HOME and drag this directly.

PKG files

However package files require us to use the system installer. One way to get around this is to unpack the .pkg file using the following commands, and load the executable from within this.

pkgutil --expand-full <path to our .pkg file> <Output Directory>

If we then navigate to the output directory, we may find additional ‘.pkg’ files. It is important to note that these are just normal directories and can be accessed by right clicking and selecting ‘show contents’.

Somewhere within this we will find the relevant package executable (most likely with the app icon showing). You can drag this into your local Applications folder and access it through double clicking.