Installing

Installing

There are several ways you can install jctl. Below is the easiest, but it requires sudo rights. You should be able to remove sudo and install it just in your user account. You can also install it into a virtual environment (which will eventually become the install method we recommend, once we learn more about it).

sudo pip3 install jctl

When you run the above command, you may be prompted to install Python. We wrote a page on install Python because you might have issues. Once jctl is installed, you can set it up.

• On your Jamf Pro server create a Jamf Pro API User
• Configure: conf-python-jamf
• Enter hostname, username, and password
• Test: conf-python-jamf -t
• You should see something like {'accounts': {'groups': None, 'users': {'user': {'id': '1', 'name': 'james'}}}}

Everything that applies to python-jamf also applies to jctl. Please see the python-jamf wiki for detailed installation and configuration instructions.

Uninstalling

sudo pip3 uninstall jctl

It will look something like this.

sudo pip3 uninstall jctl
Found existing installation: jctl 1.1.13
Uninstalling jctl-1.1.13:
  Would remove:
    /usr/local/bin/jctl
    /usr/local/bin/patch.py
    /usr/local/bin/pkgctl
    /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/jctl-1.1.13.dist-info/*
Proceed (Y/n)? y
  Successfully uninstalled jctl-1.1.13

Upgrading

Upgrading jctl is easy if you installed it via pip. pip is the Package Installer for Python.

To upgrade jctl run the following command:

sudo pip3 install --upgrade jctl

It will look something like this.

sudo pip3 install --upgrade jctl
Requirement already satisfied: jctl in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (1.1.13)
Collecting jctl
  Downloading jctl-1.1.15-py3-none-any.whl (16 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: python-jamf>=0.6.9 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from jctl) (0.7.2)
Requirement already satisfied: requests>=2.24.0 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (2.25.1)
Requirement already satisfied: keyring>=23.0.0 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (23.2.1)
Requirement already satisfied: importlib-metadata>=3.6 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from keyring>=23.0.0->python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (3.10.0)
Requirement already satisfied: zipp>=0.5 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from importlib-metadata>=3.6->keyring>=23.0.0->python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (3.4.1)
Requirement already satisfied: idna<3,>=2.5 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from requests>=2.24.0->python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (2.10)
Requirement already satisfied: urllib3<1.27,>=1.21.1 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from requests>=2.24.0->python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (1.26.4)
Requirement already satisfied: chardet<5,>=3.0.2 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from requests>=2.24.0->python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (4.0.0)
Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=2017.4.17 in /opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/site-packages (from requests>=2.24.0->python-jamf>=0.6.9->jctl) (2020.12.5)
Installing collected packages: jctl
  Attempting uninstall: jctl
    Found existing installation: jctl 1.1.13
    Uninstalling jctl-1.1.13:
      Successfully uninstalled jctl-1.1.13
Successfully installed jctl-1.1.15

Version

To display the version of jctl installed, run the following command:

jctl --version

For example, it will look something like this:

jctl --version
jctl 1.1.15
python_jamf 0.7.3 (0.6.9 required)

Custom Preferences

You configure your server, username, and password with conf-python-jamf. If you create or copy the preferences to a different location, you can manually tell jctl to use the custom location with -C.

This will look in /path/to folder for a file named "localhost.plist" and use the server and username stored in that property list file. It will use that server and username to look in the Keychain for the password.

jctl -C /path/to/localhost.plist [SUBCOMMAND]

Production & Development Preferences

For example, if you wanted to setup two preferences, one, for a development server and another for your production server you could do the following:

Define Default Preferences

First, you should decide which server you want to setup as default and which server(s) you want setup as custom preference(s): like development, testing, production, etc., with your jctl setup.

You can setup Jamf Pro on localhost if you want use Docker for testing of a development server setup, see the Docker documentation for more details.

Create Custom Preference with Path

Next, use the -C arguement with conf-python-jamf with path to custom preference location:

Development Server Custom Preference

conf-python-jamf -C /path/to/custom-prefs/my.dev.server.plist

Production Server Custom Preference

conf-python-jamf -C /path/to/custom-prefs/my.prod.server.plist