Category: Uncategorized

There are two popular reporting tools that Munki admins use to see what’s going on with their Munki fleets: MunkiReport-PHP and Sal. Which one you choose to use is up to you, and will probably depend on whether you’re more comfortable with a PHP/MySQL setup or a Docker/Django/PostgreSQL setup. If you don’t have any experience…… Continue reading Reporting on Munki clients

By design, Munki bundles all updates, installations, and removals to be done at once—either by the user through Managed Software Center, or by Munki in the background once every hour or so. There may be some exceptions in the background (for example, if there are blocking applications), but to the user interfacing with Managed Software…… Continue reading How can a user install one item through Managed Software Center without installing all pending installs/updates?

At this point, you should probably know that if you put items in a manifest’s optional installs, it will appear to users for installation/removal on the Software tab of Managed Software Center. You probably have also noticed that if you make an item a managed install, Managed Software Center will automatically install it, and if…… Continue reading How Munki manifests affect the Managed Software Center user experience

Technically, because of Default Repo Detection, you don’t have to set any preferences on a Munki client. But you may still want to. Here are some Munki preferences to consider using at your school. InstallAppleSoftwareUpdates and UnattendedAppleUpdatesYou have the option to include Apple software updates in the updates that appear to users in Managed Software…… Continue reading Munki preferences to consider

The Munki wiki has a full list of Supported Pkginfo Keys. At some point, you should explore and understand each one. If you’re at the beginning of your Munki admin’ing, though, you may want to at least consider these to start out with. You can edit most of these in MunkiAdmin by double-clicking the item…… Continue reading Munki pkginfo keys to consider

One of the most frequent questions that comes up with new Munki admins is Munki successfully installed some software, but now each time Munki runs, it wants to install the software again. Why is this? You will know exactly why an install loop happens (and how to fix it) if you read How Munki Decides…… Continue reading Avoiding Munki install loops

Munki’s command-line tools have the ability to extract icons for various items in your Munki repo, as you saw in Adding an item to your Munki repo But you can also use MunkiAdmin to extract icons for items in your repo that you may have populated using AutoPkg. In MunkiAdmin, click on File and then…… Continue reading Using MunkiAdmin to extract icons for Munki items

Install AutoPkgYou can find and install the latest release from the AutoPkg GitHub page. Set up AutoPkg for MunkiOnce it’s installed, you can runautopkg search munkitools to search for any AutoPkg recipes that have munkitools in them.Here’s an example of what the search results might look like: Name Repo Path —- —- —- munkitools2.santa.recipe arubdesu-recipes…… Continue reading Setting up and using AutoPkg .munki recipes

So far, all we’ve done is import Firefox into your Munki repo. Your Munki repo is a bit bare. It would probably take a long time to import every single piece of software you want to deploy to your Mac fleet using munkiimport every time. Fortunately, there is a project that helps you automate importing…… Continue reading Why you should use AutoPkg to populate and keep up to date your Munki repo

If you are using an MDM, and all of your Mac clients are already enrolled in the MDM, you can likely use the MDM to deploy Munki to your client machines (Mosyle, for example, definitely can do this). Hopefully, your MDM can also deploy custom .mobileconfig profiles (again, Mosyle can do this, if you upload…… Continue reading How to deploy Munki to your fleet for the first time

It’s true that you can use Default Repo Detection to have your Munki clients connect to your Munki repo without having to actually adjust the Munki preferences for all your clients, but what if you do want to set the Munki preferences? For example, instead of https://munki.YOURSCHOOL.edu/munki_repo, maybe you want to use something else entirely,…… Continue reading Setting Munki preferences for your client machines

SSL So far, we’ve just been working with http instead of https. Yeah, that’s not good going forward. So you’ll want to fix that, especially if you add basic authentication.So, yeah, even though your Munki “website” is “static,” you should at least make it https. Let’s EncryptIf your Munki repo is public-facing (try to be…… Continue reading Adding some basic security to your Munki repo

So far, you’ve just been using site_default as the manifest for your machine. That may be fine to start with, especially if all your machines (Mac Minis, iMacs, MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, etc.) are all going to get the same (managed and/or optional) software. You may find, though, that you have special cases. Maybe one…… Continue reading Organizing your Munki manifests

So now that your Munki client is pulling its manifest from the Munki repo, you can use different manifest options to make software available, mandatory for install, or mandatory for removal. When the item is put in optional installs, users can launch up Managed Software Center, click on the Software tab, and then see either INSTALL (if…… Continue reading Managed installs, managed updates, optional installs, and managed uninstalls in Munki manifests

Now that you’ve set up a web server, put the Munki repo folders on it, installed Munki tools on it, imported an item into it, and set up a manifest for it, you can finally connect a Mac client to it. Good news! Since you installed all the Munki tools (not just the admin ones),…… Continue reading Connecting a Munki client to the Munki repo