Notification Center Support - munki/munki GitHub Wiki

Support for Notification Center notifications of pending software updates

About Notification Center Support

Notification behavior

When Munki decides to notify the user of pending updates, instead of launching Managed Software Center.app, it launches munki-notifier.app, a Cocoa application you can find inside Managed Software Center.app/Contents/Helpers. This app then either posts a Notification Center notification or launches Managed Software Center.app as appropriate.

The default "escalation period" is three days. In other words, if any pending update has been available for over three days, munki-notifier will skip posting a Notification Center notification, and will instead launch Managed Software Center.app. Admins can customize this grace period by setting the ManagedInstalls preference "UseNotificationCenterDays" to the number of days Notification Center notifications should be attempted before switching to launching Managed Software Center.app.

If you would like to not use the Notification Center, and only use Managed Software Center.app, you can disable it by setting the value of UseNotificationCenterDays to -1.

ManagedInstalls preferences

Key	Type	Default	Description
UseNotificationCenterDays	integer	3	Number of days Notification Center notifications should be used before switching to launching Managed Software Center

MDM management of notifications

Notification Center notifications are generally under user control, and they can generally disable notifications from any given application. In order to 'force-on' the ability to send these notifications for your users, set the following keys as per the com.apple.notificationsettings spec, as documented by Apple:

<key>NotificationSettings</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>BadgesEnabled</key>
        <true/>
        <key>BundleIdentifier</key>
        <string>com.googlecode.munki.ManagedSoftwareCenter</string>
    </dict>
    <dict>
        <key>AlertType</key>
        <integer>2</integer>
        <key>BundleIdentifier</key>
        <string>com.googlecode.munki.munki-notifier</string>
        <key>CriticalAlertEnabled</key>
        <true/>
        <key>NotificationsEnabled</key>
        <true/>
        <key>ShowInLockScreen</key>
        <true/>
        <key>ShowInNotificationCenter</key>
        <true/>
        <key>SoundsEnabled</key>
        <true/>
    </dict>
</array>