Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: munki

  • Importing Scratch 2 Offline Editor into Munki

    Munki is fairly good at recognizing things for import. If you have a .dmg with a .app inside, it will, by default, make it so the .app gets copied to the /Applications folder. If you have a .dmg with a .pkg, it will know to run the .pkg to install the item. If you have…

  • Disabling update checks for Adobe Flash Player

    If you’re using Munki (or some other management tool) to distribute Adobe Flash Player updates to your clients, you don’t need Flash Player itself to pester users with update prompts, so you can disable that by following Greg Neagle’s old tutorial on how to disable the notifications. It’s from 2011, but the same instructions apply…

  • AutoPkg Adobe Flash Player recipes, licenses, and Munki

    13 October, 2016 update: Adobe just broke this by making the distribution page require an Adobe ID login before you can view it. Even though Flash is slowly being deprecated, people still use it. And while people still use it, Mac admins keep having to make sure their users’ Adobe Flash Player plugins are up…

  • Requiring a user to be logged in to install a Munki item

    You may occasionally get an item you want installed for clients, but the item is oddly constructed so as to require a user to be logged in. (Relevant Munki-Discuss mailing list thread) Even though there are supported pkginfo keys in Munki to require a logout or require a reboot, there is no official way to…

  • Bulk-importing .pkg files into Munki

    When GarageBand launches up after being installed, it will prompt you to install extra content, which requires an admin password to install. If you’re using Munki, you probably want to find a way around that admin password (either to not bother your users who are admins on their own machines or to not frustrate your…

  • Licensing GSP Deployments by Terminal Command

    Update 21 September, 2018: This doesn’t work at all for 10.13.6. If you’re trying to activate on 10.13.6, find more details here: Activating Geometer’s Sketchpad in macOS 10.13.6 (and beyond?) Update 26 July, 2017: Recently I found this not working any more. I had to send the command through Apple Remote Desktop (or run it…

  • AutoDMG / Outset / Munki bootstrap workflow

    Update December, 2018: Because of the changes that came with Apple’s T2 chips, I wouldn’t recommend the below workflow any more. Instead, I’d recommend a DEP=>MDM=>Munki workflow instead. I wanted to create a workflow that involved pretty much just imaging a new machine with a thin image and then having the image itself pull updates.…

  • Bash script to add optional installs for Munki

    In Terminal command to mark a Munki optional install for installation, I showed a one-off command to mark a Munki optional install item for installation. What if you want to do it in bulk, though? For example, if you’re scripting a thin image to install some software by default, but you want the option for…

  • Installing an optional install when logout/reboot items are pending in Managed Software Center

    What’s the issue? If all your updates are up-to-date in Managed Software Center, when you select an optional install to install, it will install in the background and be ready to use almost immediately. If, however, you have some pending updates that require a logout or reboot, your optional install (even an unattended install) won’t…

  • Condition Scripts for Munki

    If you’ve been using Munki for a while, you probably already know about conditional items that allow you add items to optional installs, managed installs, etc. based on a condition like whether the client is a laptop or a desktop, or whether the client is running 10.10 or 10.11. But you can also create your…

  • Creating a Munki nopkg for Remote Management

    When are nopkg items in Munki appropriate? Greg Neagle (author of and primary developer on Munki) makes a good point that in most cases, a real .pkg (instead of a nopkg) is the best choice, because of versioning and receipts. One thing that nopkg items in Munki are good for, though, is checking to make…

  • Automatically enroll or bulk-enroll Munki clients in individual manifests

    You may manage your Munki clients using a general manifest (e.g., support_staff), but you sometimes want some more control over also managing installations for individual users without always specifying the serial number as a condition in a manifest. The most popular tool for this is Munki Enroll, which automatically creates individual manifests with the larger…

  • Script to copy a Munki generic icon

    Munki is fairly good at extracting icons from applications. Sometimes, though, you have items in your Munki catalog that aren’t exactly easily icon-able, so you may want to attach a generic icon to it instead. I wrote a Python script that will copy a generic icon to any of the Munki repository items missing an…

  • Avoiding a .csv error with PrinterGenerator

    PrinterGenerator is one of the automated scripts for adding printers to Munki. It’s pretty cool—you just put together a .csv of your printers and their IP addresses, and then run the script on the .csv, and all the pkginfo files for the printers will generate. I did run into one snag, though, which is using…

  • Using OldMunkiPackages to automate cleaning out old Munki packages from your catalog

    In all honesty, I haven’t tried Spruce for Munki, which seems to have a pretty cool feature set. I wanted a simple tool to just clean out everything but the newest version of each package. So if Firefox 44.0.2 is there and Firefox 45.0 is also there, I want Firefox 44.0.2 cleaned out. I also…