Preventing Install macOS Catalina.app from automatically opening when downloaded

[horganj76]

Hello Everyone!

Has anyone been able to prevent the Install macOS Catalina app from opening automatically when downloaded as a Mac App Store App? Our organization is planning to deploy Catalina (albeit a little late), and I would like to have our users download the app as an App Store App instead of a pkg hosted on our jamf cloud instance. I would prefer this method since everyone is working from home, and I don't want everyone to download a 8.23 GB file from our jss at once.

Any advice?

[sdagley]

@horganj76 What's downloaded from the App Store is not necessarily the full installer. Apparently depending on the phase of the moon, you might end up with a stub version that downloads the required resources when it's run

[Tribruin]

Instead of pushing the App from the App Store, you could use softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer command. Create a policy that utilizes Files and Processes -> Execute Command. I would also do an inventory update at the end. Once the installer is downloaded, it will be moved to /Applications, but should not open.

[guidotti]

@RBlount I am not seeing the --fetch-full-installer command on the 10.14.6 version of softwareupdate.
I guess we cannot use that to go from Mojave to Catalina, huh?

[Tribruin]

@guidotti I always forget that option was not offered until Catalina. Sorry, for the bad information.

[boblauterbach]

You can download it once, and add it to Self Service, or push it out with Jamf Remote

[mhatt]

We are using the command:

softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.15.6

Unfortunately it still automatically launches the installer.

[sdagley]

If you're looking to download the Install macOS Catalina.app directly from Apple's servers, then Graham Pugh's erase-install will do that for you without actually starting the installer (and despite the name it also supports running the installer without erasing the Mac)