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 the item is not yet installed) or REMOVE (if the item is already installed) as options for that item. Only items that are optional installs will ever show up in the Software tab. Managed installs and managed uninstalls will not show up.
Go ahead and take Firefox out of Optional Installs and put it in Managed Installs and then save your changes.
Click the CHECK AGAIN button in Managed Software Center. Now that there are no longer any optional installs, you’ll see that the Software tab is greyed out.
Now, go ahead and delete Firefox.app from the /Applications folder, and then click CHECK AGAIN in Managed Software Center.
Since Munki sees that Firefox is missing from the /Applications folder and since the manifest your client is using has Firefox as a managed install, Munki makes sure that Firefox is installed and thus wants to re-install Firefox. If you then click UPDATE in Managed Software Center, Munki should reinstall Firefox. And then if you click CHECK AGAIN again, it should see Firefox is already installed and not try to do anything else.
Another place you can put items in a manifest is Managed Updates. All that means is, if someone installed an item not using Managed Software Center, Munki will make sure that it’s automatically kept up-to-date, as if it were installed via Managed Software Center.
So if someone installs Firefox on her own, and you don’t have Firefox as a managed update, but you keep importing new versions of Firefox into your Munki repo, she’ll see Firefox as an optional upgrade in Managed Software Center, but she can also keep ignoring the upgrade prompt. But if you have Firefox as a managed update, she’ll just have her version of Firefox in keeping automatically with the latest you have available in your Munki repo that’s in the same catalog as the manifest her computer is using.
Final one to try (ignore featured items for now—that’s a subset of optional installs, and it’s not critical to know about at this stage) is taking Firefox out of managed installs and out of optional installs, and then putting it into Managed Uninstalls and then saving.
Once you CHECK AGAIN in Managed Software Center, you should see MSC prompting to remove Firefox, because it’s a managed uninstall. If you click UPDATE, MSC will remove Firefox from your client machine.
Note that as a Munki admin, you shouldn’t ever have the same item in the same manifest be both a managed install and an optional install, a managed install and a managed uninstall, or a managed uninstall and an optional install. If you do that, you may get unexpected behavior.