{"id":79,"date":"2019-01-27T06:00:04","date_gmt":"2019-01-27T06:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/?p=79"},"modified":"2025-08-07T04:28:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T04:28:01","slug":"usingmanifests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/usingmanifests\/","title":{"rendered":"Using manifests to make Munki items available to users"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tools for managing Munki manifests<\/h2>\r\n

You can manipulate your Munki repo using only command-line tools, and I would highly recommend you keep using munkiimport<\/em> for all manual item imports (again, we’ll get to automated imports later), but I use a GUI (graphical user interface) app to manage my repo day to day, so I recommend using one. For these tutorials, I’ll be using MunkiAdmin<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

If you have time to explore the command-line tool manifestutil<\/a>, you may find it useful for quick direct manifest manipulation without having to deal with a GUI.<\/p>\r\n

What is a manifest?<\/h2>\r\n

Expanding a bit on How does Munki work?<\/a>, manifests are the key to deploying software to your fleet of Macs. One of the most frequently asked questions about Munki is I just set up Munki and there’s nothing available to install in Managed Software Center, and there’s no sidebar showing “Software” or “Categories”. How do I make things to install show up there?<\/a>, and that’s because a lot of new Munki admins don’t really understand what a manifest is.<\/p>\r\n

When your Munki clients check in with the Munki repo, one of the first things they’ll look for is a manifest, which tells the client what software it has available to install optionally, which software must be installed, which software must be updated, and which software must be removed.<\/p>\r\n

Catalogs and manifests<\/h3>\r\n

One part of a manifest is the catalog(s) it has available to it. Remember when you imported an item with munkiimport<\/em>, and it asked what catalog you wanted to import it into? You started with the testing<\/em> catalog, which is a good place to start. If you have Firefox 141.0.3 in the testing<\/em> catalog and Firefox 141.0.2 in the production<\/em> catalog, the manifests that have the testing<\/em> catalog will see 141.0.3 as the latest version of Firefox to update to or install, and the manifests that have the production<\/em> catalog will see 141.0.2 as the latest version available. If one manifest has both testing<\/em> and production<\/em> catalogs, Munki will consider whichever one is listed first (literally the manifest is a XML-formatted text file, and whichever catalog is listed above the other in the text file).<\/p>\r\n

For now, just to keep things simple, we’re going to use only the testing<\/em> catalog. We can look at using a production<\/em> catalog later.<\/p>\r\n

Some Munki admins use the analogy of the catalogs being stores and the manifests being what you put in your basket or shopping cart, but there isn’t really a good exact analogy for this, because stores can’t force you to buy certain items or force you to return items that you may own.<\/p>\r\n

Bottom line, a manifest can install, remove, or update only versions of items that are in the catalog(s) it uses.<\/p>\r\n

Creating and modifying a manifest using MunkiAdmin<\/h2>\r\n

So if you install and launch up MunkiAdmin<\/a>, the first thing you’ll see is a prompt for what repository to use.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"MunkiAdmin<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Go ahead and pick the repo that you’d set up earlier in \/Users\/Shared\/munki_repo\/<\/strong>
<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"New<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Under the File<\/strong> menu, select New Manifest<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"MunkiAdmin<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For the file name, type in site_default<\/strong>
<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Manifests<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There are three views in MunkAdmin\u2014the packages view, the catalogs view, and the manifests view. If you switch to the manifests view, you can then double-click the site_default<\/strong> manifest to edit it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Manifest<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There are a whole bunch of manifest options to edit. The only available catalog is testing<\/em>, because the only item in the Munki repo right now is Firefox, and the only catalog Firefox has right now is testing<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"MunkiAdmin<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Go ahead and check (or tick) the box next to testing<\/strong> to allow the site_default<\/em> manifest to items from the testing<\/em> catalog.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Optional<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

On the left side, click on Optional Installs<\/strong>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Plus<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Click the plus (+) sign to add an item to the optional installs section of the manifest. (When I took this screenshot, the latest Firefox was 64.0.2, but MunkiAdmin show whatever version you imported.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Item<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Right now, the only item we have to pick from is Firefox, so go ahead select that and then click Add Selected<\/strong> to add it to the optional_installs<\/em> section of the site_default<\/em> manifest.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Save<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Then, click Save<\/strong> to save your changes to the site_default<\/em> file in the manifests<\/em> folder.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Text<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If you go to \/Users\/Shared\/munki_repo\/manifests\/site_default<\/strong> and open it up in a text editor, you’ll see that the catalog this manifest uses is the testing<\/em> catalog, and it has one optional install available to clients using this manifest\u2014Firefox<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Once a client machine connects to the Munki repo, it will be able to install Firefox or remove it.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tools for managing Munki manifests You can manipulate your Munki repo using only command-line tools, and I would highly recommend you keep using munkiimport for all manual item imports (again, we’ll get to automated imports later), but I use a GUI (graphical user interface) app to manage my repo day to day, so I recommend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paDrAJ-1h","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":509,"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alansiu.net\/munkiguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}