Patch Management for Safari monterey/ventura/sonoma

@yogeshwarann I posted download links for the macOS Montery and Ventura versions of the Safari 17.3 installer in https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/safari-17-3-standalone-updaters-for-macos-ventura-and-monterey/m-p/308603/highlight/true#M268915

There is no standalone installer for Safari 17.3 for macOS Sonoma, you have to install the Sonoma 14.3 update in order to update Safari.

You can use patch management to monitor the version of Safari simply enough. Using it to update Safari is a different story.

• Using Patch Management to update Safari on the current macOS (Sonoma) is not possible as there is not a standalone package.
• Using Patch Mangement to update to manage Safari on N-1 and N-2 (currently Ventura and Monterey) is possible but requires you to repackage the Apple provided packages for each application and make a post install script to install the correct package for the target OS.
  • It is unfortunate that you must do it this way, but Jamf does not allow for multiple patch managements for the same application and does not allow multiple packages to be used in a single patch management policy.

Can you these days? In the past, Apple released new versions of Safari for some OS levels but not for others. Looking at the current state of things & recent history here looks promising, but I recall getting burned by this in the past and having to create this abomination of a smart group to work around it.

I just found this community thread which has a promising answer by using softwareupdate to check for a new update. I may look at using that as an extension attribute.

softwareupdate -l | grep Safari | grep -o 'Safari[^[:blank:]]*' | head -n 1