AdvanceKextUpdater

Keep your kexts up-to-date all the time starting from macOS 10.7

NOTE: This project is still in progress. Latest beta release is available here.

Introduction

AdvanceKextUpdater is a huge project similar to a GUI based package manager, consisting of an App and a database.

The database (kext_db branch of this project) consists of a bunch of folders where configurations with additional information is kept. The catalog.json is the file that contains link to these folders or remote URLs (if the configuration file is handled remotely by a repo or just a website).

The app parses the catalog.json file along with the configuration to determine what to do with a given Kext.

This style makes this project wholly separate from any other kext installers and can be compared to composer.json project which is used by many PHP devs to keep their external libraries up-to-date.

Features

The final release will contain the following features. You can track current progress here.

• Search, download, install, update kext(s) right from the App
• Not only install a kext but also its dependencies and remove all the potential conflicts
• Check for new updates on startup
• Ability to update kext(s) automatically (with certain restrictions, of course)
• View all information about the kext, they includes:
  • Short description
  • Guide (if available) which may be useful for some kext
  • Changes in the new version of the kext
  • License
  • Authors (Yes, they should be recognize properly)
  • Requirements
  • Conflicts
  • Replaced by (if the kext is obsolete and replaced by another kext)
  • The macOS version prior to which the kext is available, etc.
• View suggested Kext(s)
• Ability to repair permissions, update kernel cache
• View, install, update, remove a kext from URL (kext://)
  • Open AdvanceKextUpdater using kext://
  • View kext using kext://kext/<kext-name> or simply kext://<kext-name>
  • View guide using kext://guide/<kext-name>
  • Install/update kext using kext://install/<kext-name> (with a prompt)
  • Remove kext using kext://remove/<kext-name> (with a prompt)

In this app, you can only install/update a kext if all the criteria presented in the config file are matched. If they don't match, based on the config file, we may either revoke the installation or warn you of the potential harm that might have happened to your system.

Have more ideas? Create a new feature request.

Contributions

You're welcome to contribute to this project. You can contribute to the dev branch or the kext_db branch of the project. It crucial to keep the database up-to-date and to do that some clever idea will be implemented in future, but for now they have to be updated manually. So, contributions are necessary on the kext developers part.

If you're interested in contributing in the kext_db branch only, you should skip cloning the other branches. Here's a hint if you forgot how to do this:

git clone -b kext_db https://github.com/MuntashirAkon/AdvanceKextUpdater.git

License

GPLv3.0

Donations

I don't accept any donations.

Credits

• Apple for their wonderful OS
• @phpdev32 for DPCIManager's initial source code

Third-party Libraries

• MMMarkdown - For parsing markdown texts
• (modified) github-markdown-css - For styling parsed markdown texts
• (modified) ZSSUserDefaults - NSUserDefaults replacement for multiple user defaults