How to deploy Munki to your fleet for the first time

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 the mcxToProfile-generated profile as a “certificate”).

If you don’t have your clients in an MDM, maybe you have some other way to remotely install Munki on those clients. For example, if your machines have Apple Remote Desktop enabled, you might be able to use ARD to push the Munki tools .pkg to the client machines. For an ARD deployment of Munki, it may be easier to use defaults write commands to set the preferences than to deliver the .mobileconfig as a payload and then use a command to install it later.

You could also try simply instructing your users to install Munki (and the .mobileconfig profile for Munki preferences) themselves, assuming they have local admin privileges on their own machines, and assuming they actually listen when you suggest they do things.

As a fallback, if you’re in the same physical location as all or most of your clients, you can literally just walk around campus and say “Hey, I have to install this on your computer,” and then install Munki manually in person.

When I rolled out Munki, it took a little while, and I ended up doing some combination of all of the above. Some machines I could access via ARD and push the Munki tools .pkg and preferences to. Others I asked the users to install Munki on themselves. Still others I walked around to and installed Munki on manually. And then, going forward once we got an MDM, I used our MDM to install Munki on clients.

Unfortunately, if you don’t have any way to currently manage your Macs, there isn’t some magic way to get Munki set up en masse. You just have to do it. At least if your school has a full inventory of every machine, you can just go down the list and make sure you have every machine covered eventually. If your school inventory isn’t complete, you may discover even years down the road that there was some rogue unmanaged machine that you later had to put Munki on.

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