Set auto login via script on catalina 10.15

[Indigo2]

Greetings. I typically read up on here about older mac stuff, but ive actually been working on some nice modern mac's for a change and need some help.

I have a large school / office enviroment, i need to push out settings via a script to 40+ computers.

Most notably, i would like to auto login to a specified account upon startup. It appears settings can be set in plist files via a script to control this, however writing to the com.apple.loginwindow.plist has not worked. I need to make a script to set this, i can not visit each office in person.

(Ironically it can be set in system preferences in seconds, trying to do it via a script has had me stumped for a few hours.)

Any advice on how to get this done is much appriciated, any suggestions are welcome.

 

[barbu]

I think you'd want to use Configurator and enrol the machines in MDM so you can manage them properly. Then you could easily set this and many other policies.

 

[chrfr]

Greetings. I typically read up on here about older mac stuff, but ive actually been working on some nice modern mac's for a change and need some help.

I have a large school / office enviroment, i need to push out settings via a script to 40+ computers.

Most notably, i would like to auto login to a specified account upon startup. It appears settings can be set in plist files via a script to control this, however writing to the com.apple.loginwindow.plist has not worked. I need to make a script to set this, i can not visit each office in person.

(Ironically it can be set in system preferences in seconds, trying to do it via a script has had me stumped for a few hours.)

Any advice on how to get this done is much appriciated, any suggestions are welcome.

The post above is on the right track. You're not going to be able to manage a lot of Catalina via scripts. Using an MDM (Configurator is not one) is really a necessity now.

 

[Indigo2]

im already using a seperate product to manage the machines. for the most part im able to just adjust settings from a web interface, but i dont have a setting to enable auto login, so im trying to roll it out via a script.

Still a little new to some of the terminology here, forgive me if i sound off.

 

[bogdanw]

On a single Mac, these commands work:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist autoLoginUser user

sudo plutil -replace autoLoginUser -string user /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set autoLoginUser user" /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

For a script, take a look at https://github.com/tiiiecherle/osx_...pp_preferences/11c_macos_preferences_10_15.sh by tiiiecherle

 

[Indigo2]

This worked perfectly, thank you.