How to enable/disable OS X beta participation from Terminal?
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02-03-2021 - |
Question
Does anyone know how to enable/disable OS X beta participation from the Terminal?
Typically one could opt-out of the Beta program by choosing the following option found in the App Store preferences pane. However once you opt out, the option to opt-in disappears and one has to use a utility found online to opt in again. This is tedious for me. Since most settings in OS X are managed using defaults, I wonder if anyone has a set of commands to enable/disable this option in the preference pane?
If not then perhaps a process where I can discover the relevant defaults read/write statements to enable this feature?
Ultimately, I would like to simply be able to opt-in during certain periods and opt-out during other times.
If there is a simpler approach than using the Terminal, I am open to learning about that as well.
Nota Bene - Please let me know in the comments if anything is unclear or if more information is necessary to improve this question.
System: I am running Yosemite and El Capitan on different machines.
Solution
As mentioned by SeanCLT, you/your system needs to be enrolled in one of the programs and you need to have the right utilities installed The statement about the utilities is an assumption, I have not tried it without. After that you can use the softwareupdate
command to enable and disable the beta/pre-release source.
You can disable it via:
softwareupdate --clear-catalog
Enabling is a bit more tricky, because you need to choose your channel/source. The options are:
OS X Public Beta
sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.12beta-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz
OS X Developer Beta catalog
sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.12seed-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz
OS X Gold Master catalog
sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz
OTHER TIPS
Steps to Enroll into Beta
- Go to https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/guide
- Sign in with your Apple ID
- Click Enroll Your Devices on top right menu bar
- Step 2 has a blue button "Download the OS X EL Capitan Public Beta Access Utility"
I was also enrolled into beta on my VM i recently unenrolled it after 10.11.4 release
you might find this question useful How to move from beta to stable releases of OS X