This is kind of a dual-purpose Mac tutorial—how to automate Adobe Remote Update Manager and how to create an installation package using a point-and-click graphical interface.

Automating Adobe Remote Update Manager

You can find the Adobe Remote Update Manager on Adobe’s Creative Suite Enterprise Deployment page. Just scroll down a bit until you find it.

When you launch up what appears to be an installer, it’s not an installer at all. It’s just a folder with a bunch of files in it.

For our purposes here, the only file that matters is RemoteUpdateManager. That is the actual executable binary that initiates the updates. You don’t really need to install the RUM man(ual) page. If you want to find the update options (including how to use a proxy instead of getting updates directly from Adobe), you can find those on Adobe’s website.

Remember where the RemoteUpdateManager file is. We’ll need that file later.

Then create a text file called local.rum.plist and put in the following contents:

You’ll see that day, month, and weekday are commented out. You can uncomment those and pick a particular recurrence. Right now it’s also set to run every day at 18:15 (or 6:15pm), but you can change those values as well.

The text file you just created is the launch daemon that will run the Adobe Remote Update Manager (RUM) once a day at 18:15 (or with whatever frequency you set up).

Creating the distributable package

If there are multiple machines you want to set this up for, you don’t want to be manually copying files to two different locations on each computer. We’re going to set it up so you can install a .pkg file on each computer, or distribute the .pkg file to each computer using something like Munki.

Apple provides its own official documentation on how to build a .pkg file. If you can use those instructions, good on you.

I found it much easier to use a program called Packages to do it the point-and-click way.

When you go to the Packages website, click the Download link.

Once you open the download, double-click Install Packages.pkg.

Click Continue.

After you read the agreement, click Continue again.

Click Agree.

Click Install.

Authenticate and then click Install Software.

Click Close.

Now that it’s installed, go ahead and launch up the Packages program.

For this situation (Adobe RUM), we’re just going to select Raw Package and then click Next.

Name your project accordingly.

By default, the project will be a subdirectory of your /Users/username folder, so you may want to pick a different directory. If you’re fine with the default, just go with it.

In Settings you can change the Identifier to represent your actual company/school/organization instead.

Click on Payload and then select LaunchDaemons (under Library) and the plus sign below it to add to that folder (sorry—I accidentally cropped the plus sign out of this screenshot).

Then go find the RemoteUpdateManager binary you downloaded from Adobe earlier.

Click Add.

The default permissions should be fine here (644 or -rw-r–r–).

Click on Scripts (under /Library) and the plus sign below.

Then select your local.rum.plist file you created earlier.

Click Add.

These permissions should be fine. It just means any user will be able to run RemoteUpdateManager, which is fine. Only the script will probably run it, but there’s no harm in the users being able to invoke it manually, too, if they want.

Go ahead and save the project.

Then click Build and select Build.

The project should build successfully (and fairly quickly).

Then you’ll see your installer file in the directory you should earlier, under the subdirectory build. If you’re using Munki to distribute, then you can do a munkiimport directly on this .pkg file.