Using Munki to ignore Catalina upgrade in macOS

Update: Apple has deprecated the --ignore flag, so this probably will never work again.

Apple used to make you go out of your way to download an OS upgrade. Then, Apple started having those OS upgrade installers auto-download to the /Applications folder. Then Apple made it so OS upgrades appeared as regular updates.

For Mac admins who aren’t ready to have their clients upgrade to Catalina (and potentially have a lot of things break), there is a way to tell the client machine to ignore the update and thus not advertise it to the user.

For those who are Munki admins, I’ve created a nopkg that will allow you to “install” ignoring the Catalina upgrade (but you can easily tweak the script to ignore any update) and also “uninstall” ignoring the Catalina upgrade (or any update).

Note: If you “ignore” Catalina, you can still find it in the Mac App Store, but if you try to install it, it will open up System Preferences and say it can’t be found. So “ignoring” actually means “disabling.” That doesn’t stop you from using Munki to install an upgrade, though.

Posted

October 12, 2019

Mac admin’ing

alanysiu

Tags:

catalina, macos, munki, nopkg

Comments

4 responses to “Using Munki to ignore Catalina upgrade in macOS”

Edgar Liu

January 22, 2020

Thanks for posting the nokpg script to ignore Catalina update. I can’t figure out how to get rid off the red “1” update from Sys prefs icon from the dock. I tried the following command line
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0
killall Dock

The update came back after a while. Any suggestions?

Reply
1. alanysiu
  
  January 23, 2020
  
  Are you sure the “1” update in System Preferences is for a Catalina upgrade and not for something else, like Apple wanting you to sign into iCloud?
  
  Reply
  1. Edgar Liu
    
    January 25, 2020
    
    I believe the notification was there before I deploy the Ignore Catalina Update script. It is not from the iCloud update. For some reason, it remembers the previous notification update for Catalina.
    
    Reply
    1. alanysiu
      
      January 25, 2020
      
      Here’s a great place for follow-up support if you need it. See you there!
      
      Reply