Installing macOS - munki/munki GitHub Wiki

Packaging the OS X installer for use with Munki

This is legacy documentation, not applicable for recent versions of Munki.

Munki 3 and later provide a "native" option: see macOS Installer Application support. Use this native support for upgrading to Sierra or later with Munki 3 or later. The remainder of this document is for historical record, or for those still running Munki 2 and/or "upgrading" to a release of macOS older than 10.12.

It is possible to package up OS X installers in order to install (or more accurately, upgrade to) Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan or Sierra using Munki. Once you've packaged the OS X installer in this way, you may use Munki to install Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, or Sierra in the same way you install, say, Microsoft Office. And you would likely want to name each major macOS upgrade installer item differently, the same way you would name Office2011 and Office2016 differently.

You'll need some tools to package up the OS X installer.

You can download a zip archive here:

https://github.com/munki/createOSXinstallPkg/archive/master.zip

Or you may clone the Git repo:

git clone https://github.com/munki/createOSXinstallPkg.git

See https://github.com/munki/createOSXinstallPkg/blob/master/README.md for more info on the use of the tools.

To prevent Apple softwareupdates from being offered in the same Munki install session as one with a package you built with createOSXInstallPkg (for example, to prevent a 10.10.5 update or Apple Security update from being applied at the same time Munki is applying an upgrade to El Capitan), make sure to add

<key>apple_item</key>
<true/>

to the pkginfo for your OS X upgrade package.

The receipt left behind by a createOSXinstallPkg-generated package may not be useful if you also want to detect that the OS has been upgraded/installed by other means.

(In other words: if you were to add an "InstallMountainLion" package to the managed_installs for a certain machine, but that machine already had Mountain Lion, installed some other way, Munki would fail to find the receipt and attempt to install Mountain Lion anyway.)

So instead we should look for receipts that will be there no matter how OS X is installed.

To find the exact packagid version string run pkgutil on a Mac with the current version of OS X you want to install.

pkgutil --pkg-info com.apple.pkg.BaseSystemBinaries

Here are examples of what I've been using successfully:

<key>receipts</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>packageid</key>
    	<string>com.apple.pkg.BaseSystemBinaries</string>
    	<key>version</key>
    	<string>10.7.0.1.1.1306847324</string>
    </dict>
</array>

<key>receipts</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>packageid</key>
        <string>com.apple.pkg.BaseSystemBinaries</string>
        <key>version</key>
        <string>10.8.0.1.1.1306847324</string>
    </dict>
</array>

<key>receipts</key> 
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>packageid</key> 
        <string>com.apple.pkg.BaseSystemBinaries</string>
        <key>version</key>
        <string>10.9.0.1.1.1306847324</string>
    </dict>
</array>

<key>receipts</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>packageid</key>
        <string>com.apple.pkg.BaseSystemBinaries</string>
        <key>version</key>
        <string>10.10.0.1.1.1412852630</string>
    </dict>
</array>

Beginning with El Capitan, com.apple.pkg.BaseSystemBinaries is not part of the install. Instead of modifying the receipts array, I recommend adding an installs array instead. (You could also do this with older versions of OS X.)

	<key>installs</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>ProductVersion</key>
			<string>10.11</string>
			<key>path</key>
			<string>/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist</string>
			<key>type</key>
			<string>plist</string>
			<key>version_comparison_key</key>
			<string>ProductVersion</string>
		</dict>
	</array>

Sierra would have a similar installs array to El Capitan.

	<key>installs</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>ProductVersion</key>
			<string>10.12</string>
			<key>path</key>
			<string>/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist</string>
			<key>type</key>
			<string>plist</string>
			<key>version_comparison_key</key>
			<string>ProductVersion</string>
		</dict>
	</array>

Munki will gladly offer (and allow the built-in checks to make it fail) the OS install on hardware that is not capable of running that particular release. You can use logic like the one found here for Mojave to do a conditional item and prevent this from looping at the worst, or polluting logs with errors and warnings at the least.