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Mac Quick Start

This page describes how to get started with managing Google Chrome on a Mac network using Apple’s Profile Manager. These instructions are only an example to help you get started. You can use any system management software you choose, but specific steps may vary.

Note: These steps focus only on pushing out a plist configuration file for the Chrome Browser. Your Mac network must be set up and in a managed state. This guide does not cover how to setup macOS Server or Profile Manager to manage your Mac devices.

  1. Log into Profile Manager on the server machine from a web browser
  2. Navigate to Devices > Settings, choose the device group for which to define Chrome policies.
  3. Click Edit.
  4. Go to Custom Settings and add a Preference Domain with domain 'com.google.Chrome'
  5. Upload a pre-configured plist file or manually add items by key and value. A full list and description of policies can be found at https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3.
  6. Click Ok and payload will be created and synced to the selected devices.

Debugging

If you have trouble, it usually pays off to examine whether the settings are correctly stored and read by Chrome. First of all, navigate to about:policy in Chrome. It lists any policy settings that Chrome has picked up. If your settings show up, good. If not, you can dig deeper and check whether macOS actually put them into place correctly. Mandatory policy is stored in /Library/Managed Preferences/<username>/com.google.Chrome.plist while recommended policy is stored in /Library/Preferences/com.google.Chrome.plist. The plutil command can be used from a terminal to convert it to XML format:

# sudo -s
# cd /Library/Managed Preferences/<username>;
# plutil -convert xml1 com.google.Chrome.plist
# cat com.google.Chrome.plist

For debugging, this file is in a place where it can be edited manually. Chrome will pick up the updated preferences automatically. Note that this is not recommended for making persistent changes to policy, since macOS will rewrite the file with settings configured through Workgroup Manager.

Recent versions of macOS may cache values from these files and so you may need to run defaults read "/Library/Managed Preferences/... before changes will be noticed. This can also apply if a plist file is deleted, in which case that same command is needed for macOS to notice the deletion.

Chrome on macOS does not show unknown policies on the chrome://policy page. If you don't find a policy you have set there check if the name is spelled correctly and if the policy is actually supported on the macOS platform.

Notes for Chromium

Chromium can be managed in a similar way, with a few differences:

Unknown issues

Please file a bug report at http://new.crbug.com and select the "Enterprise Issue" template.