More App Store tips for admins

Continuing the tech ramble about how to keep the App Store from your users…

So, I figured out the two ways the App Store icon is added to the dock:

1. Existing users on an upgraded system are affected by this file: /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup

Looking at the add-app key inside contains the answer:


<key>add-app</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>path</key>
<string>/Applications/App Store.app</string>
<key>after</key>
<string>begin</string>
</dict>
</array>

We can rid ourselves of this behavior with defaults:

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup add-app

However, if you try to use a loginhook to remove the icon, it will not take effect unitl the second login, sine the loginhook runs before Apple’s dockfixup is applied.

The solution to a user never seeing it (and avoiding calls about it) is to use a daemon that runs at system startup and deletes the entry in the plist before it is ever used.

Save as /Library/LaunchDaemon/com.brunerd.dockfixer.plist (or whatever you wish):


<?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>Label</key>

 <string>com.sts.dockfixup</string>

 <key>ProgramArguments</key>

 <array>

 <string>defaults</string>

 <string>delete</string>

 <string>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup</string>

 <string>add-app</string>

 </array>

 <key>RunAtLoad</key>

 <true/>

</dict>

</plist>

You could call another script, check for add-app’s presence, but having this run everytime, insures that despite OS updates and reversions of files your user will never have App Store added to their Docks.

2. Suppressing App Store in new user accounts is affected by Dock.app’s default.plist:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/default.plist

But just deleting this and not com.apple.fixup.plist will not do what you want since fixup will still run, you must delete both. Altering that is the perfect job for removeitemfromdock… if only it worked with a supplied path… now it does! So after installing and downloading you can run this command to alter the default dock:

sudo /sbin/removeitemfromdock -f /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/default.plist /Applications/App\ Store.app/

You could make this another Daemon or just have the daemon call an external script, your choice, I can’t do all the work for you :)