Printers can often be the most frustrating part of Mac management, but Addigy has made large strides in simplifying your deployment of printer settings to all your Macs using our built-in MDM (Mobile Device Management) Configuration payload (Printing). Below are the instructions for implementing this feature in your Catalog with data that can be found on existing printer setups from your macOS devices.
Before you begin building out a printer configuration within Addigy, you will need two things:
- Any necessary printer drivers should be deployed to your devices before proceeding. This can be done easily through Custom Software within Addigy. You can learn more about Custom Software in our article Creating Custom Software.
- A device that already has the printer correctly configured. This device will be used to gather the necessary fields for the configuration.
- AirPrint-configured printers will not contain a vital data point (PPD URL) and must instead be configured with a Custom configuration (found under Catalog > MDM Configurations)
To reiterate, this workflow is only applicable to printers that have drivers available for deployment. If your printer only supports a driverless workflow like AirPrint, this MDM profile will not successfully configure the printer.
If you are not sure what your printer supports, please consult the printer manufacturer's website to see if your printer model offers drivers for download, or reach out to their support team for more information.
Creating the Printer MDM Configuration
- Navigate to the Catalog, click MDM Profiles, then click New.
- Filter for Mac, and select the Printing profile.
- Name the payload and choose the appropriate settings.
- Under Printer List, select New Printer.
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The Add Printer section will display where you will need to enter the information for your printer:
To retrieve Printer Name, Device URI, Printer Location, Printer Model, and PPD URL, you can use the following command to pull up the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) configuration.
Note: You will need to add sudo to your command (below) if you are not running it from within Addigy.
cat /etc/cups/printers.conf
The required information would be the Name (Shown as <Printer "Printer Name">), the MakeModel, and the DeviceURI
Note: You may have more than one printer presented to you in the printers.conf file
The final field, PPDURL should point to the appropriate printer driver. If this field is incorrect, the printer will be installed but will use a generic printer driver which may limit the printing capabilities to that device.
Note: If you're not getting output with the below command, please make sure that the correct printer drivers have been installed on the device.
To find the PPDURL, run this command on the configured device (sudo if not running command through Addigy).
Change the $yourPrinterMakeModel for whatever you entered as the MakeModel field in the printer Profile.
lpinfo --make-and-model "$yourPrinterMakeModel" -m
This will list the available drivers for that model on your device. The file PPDURL will look something like this and will usually end in .gz.
NOTE: If the Path contains spaces, you can apply backslashes to the driver path in the 'PPD URL' section so that the driver gets honored in the payload.
Now we can copy all the data over to the Add Printer dialogue boxes. Click Save.
The printer will be added to the list, you can now click Create Profile.
Note: you may add more printers to the configuration list if you desire, simply follow steps 3-4 as necessary.
Your Printer configuration will now be created and available to deploy from the MDM Profiles in your Catalog.
Congratulations, you have now set up your first printer!