Info

NOTE: These posts are being re-created from old Jamf Nation posts not because they are the best but because they may have useful things that were mangled in the Jamf Nation transition to its most recent hosting platform.

That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

Note

So,  added jq to macOS. I do have a funny story about this… The version I will tell here in public is: I was told that would never happen & then it did!

I was very glad about this (& so were lots of people.) Point being, this technique is unnecessary.


I am not a huge Firefox user, but, there are many things that are excellent about it & about how it’s made. I sometimes get sad it isn’t as popular as it used to be especially given the fact that Google is destroying the internet & Google Chrome has no real competition.

Here is a quick example…

Firefox publishes a URL to get information about updates & releases which returns a simple JSON object:

% curl -LsS 'https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json'

{
  "FIREFOX_AURORA": "",
  "FIREFOX_DEVEDITION": "101.0b9",
  "FIREFOX_ESR": "91.9.1esr",
  "FIREFOX_ESR_NEXT": "",
  "FIREFOX_NIGHTLY": "102.0a1",
  "FIREFOX_PINEBUILD": "",
  "LAST_MERGE_DATE": "2022-05-02",
  "LAST_RELEASE_DATE": "2022-05-03",
  "LAST_SOFTFREEZE_DATE": "2022-04-28",
  "LATEST_FIREFOX_DEVEL_VERSION": "101.0b9",
  "LATEST_FIREFOX_OLDER_VERSION": "3.6.28",
  "LATEST_FIREFOX_RELEASED_DEVEL_VERSION": "101.0b9",
  "LATEST_FIREFOX_VERSION": "100.0.2",
  "NEXT_MERGE_DATE": "2022-05-30",
  "NEXT_RELEASE_DATE": "2022-05-31",
  "NEXT_SOFTFREEZE_DATE": "2022-05-26"
}

So easy & practical. Want the latest Firefox version? Here’s one way that does not require anything other than commands available in the shell:

% jsonval(){
  JSON="$1"
  osascript -l 'JavaScript' \
    -e 'const env = $.NSProcessInfo.processInfo.environment.objectForKey("JSON").js' \
    -e "JSON.parse(env).$2"
}
% data="$(curl -LsS https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json)"
% key='LATEST_FIREFOX_VERSION'
% jsonval "$data" "$key"
100.0.2

Much of the credit for this code belongs to these posts:

with assistance from @pico in the Mac admins Slack #scripting & #bash channels.

My absolute favorite thing in the Firefox update data, however, is NEXT_RELEASE_DATE !!!!

% key='NEXT_RELEASE_DATE'
% jsonval "$data" "$key"
2022-05-31

If only all software publishers were so organized & conscientious…


Source: https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/firefoxy/m-p/266970