getMacOsVersion()

September 9th, 2020 · From Writing a debug script

If you ever need to programmatically display the current macOS version from a Node.js script but do not want to rely on external dependencies such as macos-release or os-name, you can use the following technique:

const { readFileSync } = require('fs')
const xml2js = require('xml2js')

const getMacOsVersion = async () => {
  const path = '/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist'
  const content = readFileSync(path, 'utf8')
  const { plist } = await xml2js.parseStringPromise(content)

  // Returns `Mac OS X` (at index 2) and `10.15.6` (at index 3)
  return plist.dict[0].string.slice(2, 4).join(' ')
}