Adding your organization's common tools or newly-installed items to a user's Dock can minimize confusion for your colleagues, and is a common task for Mac admins.
For those managing their fleet with Jamf Pro, the jamf binary includes a
modifyDock command which allows you to apply certain Dock modifications. It
isn't a fully-featured Dock management tool, but it does include enough
functionality to add new items to a user's Dock.
I was recently working on a project where I needed to conditionally add a Dock
item based on some scripted logic. I wanted to minimize external dependencies,
so I developed a method to leverage the jamf binary's built-in Dock management
capability and its -file flag to complete the task.
First, here's the documentation for the modifyDock command, which you can read
by running sudo jamf help modifyDock:
Usage: jamf modifyDock -file <file name> [-leaveRunning] [-beginning] [-remove]
Usage: jamf modifyDock -id <dock_item_id> [-leaveRunning] [-beginning] [-remove]
-file The file that contains the formatted dock items.
-id The dock_item_id of the dock item on the JSS.
-leaveRunning The Dock process will not be restarted.
-beginning The item will be placed at the beginning (left side) of the Dock.
-remove The item will be removed instead of added.
Typical use of this command assumes use of the -id flag, which requires
passing the ID of a "Dock Item" as configured within your Jamf Pro instance.
Dock Items can be added to Jamf Pro via the web console or by
using Jamf Admin. Once you've added a Dock Item to Jamf Pro, you can add it to a
Mac's dock by using the Dock Items payload within a Policy, or by calling sudo jamf modifyDock -id <Dock Item ID> on the Mac itself.
However, the jamf binary's modifyDock command also accepts a -file flag.
The built-in help states the flag expects The file that contains the formatted dock items. – a little vague. Online searches didn't turn up much additional
information, and the official Jamf Pro documentation doesn't cover the binary in
great detail.
With some experimentation, I found that the -file flag expects an on-disk
path to a file that contains XML representing one or more Dock item entries.
Roughly, the required format of that XML to add an app to the Dock is as follows:
GUID
-91117049
tile-data
file-data
_CFURLString
file://[path to app]/
_CFURLStringType
15
file-label
[item name]
tile-type
file-tile
Note: The GUID key can be any value, but Jamf Pro uses a consistent value across all instances, to my knowledge.
That's easy enough to generate the required data on-the-fly within a shell script, so I wrote a function to do just that.
This function requires a single argument: the path to the item you want to add to the Dock.
Stepping through the function, we first determine if the passed path is a directory that exists on the Mac. If so – and that directory is not actually an app bundle – the Dock item will be created as a "directory tile," which appears with a folder icon on the Dock. Otherwise, we assume the path is an app or individual file.
Next, we generate a temporary file on disk to which we can write the XML representing the new Dock item. The temporary file's path is captured.
Then we populate a blob of XML with our custom values, and finally print out the path to the that temporary file.
Using the function is as simple as calling dockitem within a script, then
passing a path as an argument.
Putting it all together, we can then feed that file to the jamf binary's
modifyDock command using command substitution like so:
#!/bin/zsh
For another example, let's determine the logged-in user's home directory and add that to the Dock as a directory tile.
#!/bin/zsh
CURRENTUSER=
HOMEDIR=
This script will read the NFSHomeDirectory attribute of the
currently-logged-in user's account and add it to the Dock. Dynamically
determining the user's home directory path is not otherwise possible with a Jamf
Pro policy alone, so this method bridges that gap.
Ultimately, you can probably file this method under "things you should probably do a better way, but this is also kind of neat and you may find a use."
A purpose-built tool like docklib or dockutil will offer wildly more flexibility and control over the Dock.
But... this will work in a pinch for simple needs.