Disabling the iCloud sign-in pop-up message on Lion and later

Starting in 10.7.2, Apple set the iCloud sign-in to pop up on the first login.

10.7.5 iCloud pop-up message

10.8.5 iCloud pop-up message

10.9.0 iCloud pop-up message

Since having this appear may not be desirable in all Mac environments, it makes sense to be able to turn this off for new user accounts. As part of preparing for Mavericks in my own shop, I’ve developed a script that should disable the iCloud pop-up on 10.7.2 – 10.9.0. See below the jump for the details.

Apple is using /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant.plist to store the settings that indicate whether or not the iCloud sign-in process has run. Building on work done by the folks behind DeployStudio, I’ve built a script that pre-sets those values for new and existing accounts on a particular Mac. In turn, that should stop the iCloud pop-up message from appearing on that Mac.

Update – 10-30-2013: It looks like setting the following values are not needed to block the iCloud pop-up:

LastPreLoginTasksPerformedVersion
LastPreLoginTasksPerformedBuild

I’ve updated the script to remove the parts that referenced setting those values.

The script is below and is also available on my GitHub repo.

	#!/bin/sh
	# Determine OS version
	osvers=$(sw_vers -productVersion | awk -F. '{print $2}')
	sw_vers=$(sw_vers -productVersion)
	# Checks first to see if the Mac is running 10.7.0 or higher.
	# If so, the script checks the system default user template
	# for the presence of the Library/Preferences directory.
	#
	# If the directory is not found, it is created and then the
	# iCloud pop-up settings are set to be disabled.
	if [[ ${osvers} -ge 7 ]]; then
	for USER_TEMPLATE in "/System/Library/User Template"/*
	do
	defaults write "${USER_TEMPLATE}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant DidSeeCloudSetup -bool TRUE
	defaults write "${USER_TEMPLATE}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant GestureMovieSeen none
	defaults write "${USER_TEMPLATE}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant LastSeenCloudProductVersion "${sw_vers}"
	done
	# Checks first to see if the Mac is running 10.7.0 or higher.
	# If so, the script checks the existing user folders in /Users
	# for the presence of the Library/Preferences directory.
	#
	# If the directory is not found, it is created and then the
	# iCloud pop-up settings are set to be disabled.
	for USER_HOME in /Users/*
	do
	USER_UID=`basename "${USER_HOME}"`
	if [ ! "${USER_UID}" = "Shared" ]
	then
	if [ ! -d "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences ]
	then
	mkdir -p "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences
	chown "${USER_UID}" "${USER_HOME}"/Library
	chown "${USER_UID}" "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences
	fi
	if [ -d "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences ]
	then
	defaults write "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant DidSeeCloudSetup -bool TRUE
	defaults write "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant GestureMovieSeen none
	defaults write "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant LastSeenCloudProductVersion "${sw_vers}"
	chown "${USER_UID}" "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant.plist
	fi
	fi
	done
	fi

view raw

gistfile1.sh

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