Incorporating open-source apps into Jamf Pro

Speed and automate many common tasks with open source apps

Many Mac admins incorporate open-source code and scripts into their workflows to save time and customize their Jamf Pro instances. They can accomplish repetitive tasks more easily than by going in through the web-based Jamf interface alone.

Every organization is unique, and every Apple admin has their own skills and needs. The judicious use of open-source code and scripts can speed up and automate many tasks, as well as allowing for increased flexibility.

How to find open source apps

Three words: Other Jamf admins. Follow blogs of smart admins who share their stuff. Google ‘open-source Jamf apps’ and follow your nose. But the best place to find other Mac admins is Jamf Nation: the largest Apple IT management community in the world. It’s free, it’s voluminous, and Mac admins are always eager to help each other solve puzzles.

How to choose an open-source app

Github. com, bitbucket.org and gitlab.com are the places to seek open-source apps. For a place to find Jamf-specific code, you can visit https://github.com/jamf. But once you get there, how do you decide which app is stable and supported enough to use?

• Sort by stars for highly-rated repositories
• Recent activity in the activity trackers means people are paying attention and updating regularly.
• Find repositories backed by large entities like Apache or Linux: more people working on code means it will generally be of a higher quality, and has been more scrutinized than other code.

Read The Guide to Open-Source Apps and Jamf Pro

If you're looking for some of the most useful and well-vetted open-source resources, download and read our guide. We've taken some time laying out some of the larger players and explaining why they're so useful and how to use them. You'll find information on:

• The Mac@IBM enrollment app
• Munki
• autoPkg
• JamJar

And we'll share a few other Mac admin favorites, as well:

• The MUT
• DEPNotify
• The Jamf Pro API

Jamf Pro is robust, flexible, and adaptable to different needs. Why not make it even more adaptable and automate common tasks? Read on to learn how.