CatalogURL’s

I blogged about changing the CatalogURL back in the days and nowadays websites are no longer shy to mention what you need to do in order to get a Beta or Developer seed without first having to sign up for Apple programs. All you need to do is change the App Store URL – the so called CatalogURL – to one of the following with sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --set-catalog

Developer Program Members

https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11seed-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Beta Program Members

https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11beta-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Regular Updates

https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Edit:

You can show/verify the CatalogURL with the following terminal command:

sudo defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL

Et voilà.

7 thoughts on “CatalogURL’s”

hmm. not working here. this catalog change enables softwareupdate to download and install developer-seed OS updates without enrolling in the dev program, right?

so i sudo’d the catalog change to the developer url, and then listed available updates – response was none available (from both command line and app store gui).

then tried restarting mac, still no dice. ran sudo softwareupdate -clear-catalog command to reset catalog url, then tried both dev and beta urls, still “no updates available”.

i’m on current yosemite 10.10.5 – am i missing something?

pikeralpha | September 22, 2015 at 7:47 am

Well. Sort of. First check the Beta seed, which should work, and after that you can swap the CatalogURL for the developer seed one.

Reply
- nimmolo | September 22, 2015 at 8:11 am
  
  First of all – i should say thanks for the amazing and handy macosxbootloader.
  
  however, for sure the catalogurl isn’t allowing me to get el cap’n through softwareupdate.
  
  i just now changed it to the Beta seed, and here’s the response
  
  sudo defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL
  
  https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11beta-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz
  
  softwareupdate -l
  
  Software Update Tool
  Copyright 2002-2012 Apple Inc.
  
  Finding available software
  No new software available.

Hey man I just noticed you had missed one (-) from your: sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate –set-catalog so i changed it to — set-catalog 🙂 then it worked thanks for your amazing work and blog, hope you doing well take care 🙂