Choosing the Best Recipe

For certain search results, you may find that there are multiple recipes with the same name, and you're not sure which one to choose. The best way to select which recipe you want to use is to read and understand the contents of the recipe, and use whichever one best matches your needs.

However, here's a shorthand guide for selecting recipes. Follow this advice at your own risk:

Positive things to look for:

• Recipes in the autopkg/recipes repo are generally well trusted and widely used
• Recipe repos that are well maintained by their author (check the number of outstanding pull requests)
• Recipe only uses "core" processors, and as few as possible

Negative things to watch out for:

• Typos and inconsistent formatting
• Organization-specific variables
• Custom processors (not a dealbreaker, but requires deeper inspection)
• Preinstall/postinstall scripts (again, not a dealbreaker, but look closer)
• Read the description of the recipe to make sure it's not planned to be deprecated
• Read the repo's README to make sure it's not planned to be deprecated

If you're still not sure, pop into the MacAdmins Slack and join the #autopkg room.