In order to more easily integrate Munki with other management systems, Munki supports a "LocalOnlyManifest". This is simply a manifest file stored locally on the client. It is created/managed/installed by some other management tool, perhaps Puppet, or Chef, or even Jamf Pro.

This feature can be safely ignored by most Munki admins.

A Munki preference, LocalOnlyManifest, defines the name of a locally-installed manifest, typically managed/created/installed by some external management system.

Creating a LocalOnlyManifest enables administrators to specify additional managed_installs, managed_uninstalls, managed_updates or optional_installs in a local file that augments those defined on the Munki server. Only those four top-level keys or "sections" will be processed. Other keys/sections of "regular" Munki manifests, if they exist, will be ignored. (So no conditional_items, featured_installs, or default_installs, for example.)

For example, if your Munki client is using the site_default manifest and you wanted to add a managed_install without editing that server-side manifest, you could define a LocalOnlyManifest and populate it with the selected package ...

Define a LocalOnlyManifest:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/ManagedInstalls LocalOnlyManifest extra_packages

Contents of /Library/Managed Installs/manifests/extra_packages:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>managed_installs</key>
    <array>
        <string>Firefox</string>
    </array>
    <key>managed_uninstalls</key>
    <array>
        <string>GoogleChrome</string>
    </array>
</dict>
</plist>

This example ensures Firefox remains added to the list of managed_installs, and GoogleChrome remains added to the list of managed_uninstalls. As with any manifests, the admin must be careful not to create contradictions.

NOTE: Adding additional catalogs to your LocalOnlyManifest will have no effect. Packages managed using a LocalOnlyManifest must already be present in the available catalogs.