Serving Mac OS X installation packages over HTTP using nginx and ApacheEdit

Created , updated

I was wondering if it would be wise to serve Mac OS X installation packages (.pkg) files directly over HTTP, or whether browsers would choke on them and do silly things like display them as garbled text in the browser window rather than writing them out to disk. (Up till now I’ve always wrapped them up in a zip archive just to be on the safe side, despite the fact that this requires users to perform an additional extraction step before using the package, which has always annoyed me.)

Safari does the right thing out of the box, as you would expect, but a quick test using curl shows that the default headers are indeed wrong:

$ curl -O -D header-dump \
  http://example.com/a/products/wincent-icon-util/download/WincentIconUtility.pkg
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 23488  100 23488    0     0  16723      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 20213
$ cat header-dump
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.6.35
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:04:21 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:56:05 GMT
ETag: "10b0369-5bc0-ffffab40"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 23488

We don’t want the Content-Type to be text/plain at all. A quick test with Firefox proves that this is a bad thing, because the package is shown in the browser window rather than downloaded.

Setting up the MIME type

We need a line like:

application/octet-stream              pkg;

In our /usr/local/nginx/conf/mime.types file.

And then restarting nginx. Seeing as I use monit, this means doing the following as root:

monit restart nginx-rails

We also need to change the line:

application/octet-stream        bin dms lha lzh exe class so dll img iso dmg

In /etc/mime.types to:

application/octet-stream        bin dms lha lzh exe class so dll img iso dmg pkg

For the benefit of Apache. Notice that I already added dmg to that line in a previous occasion.

Now we can restart Apache (as root):

apachectl graceful