Unattended Install for macOS

Open a terminal and run the following command:

API_KEY=foobar123 sudo -E installer -pkg prey-mac-1.X.X-xxx.pkg -target /

Important: You  must pass a valid API_KEY value or the process won't work.

The script will actually check if the key is valid and if the account has available slots before copying anything to disk. This means that if the  API_KEY verification fails, the install process will exit with a fatal error and it won't copy anything.

Image Deployment

To image deploy Prey on your computers is simple. Steps must be followed entirely, though, or bad things might happen. The most important part is that Prey must be the last app to be installed on the master machine. You can't connect it to the internet after this process or you'll get cloned machines on your Prey account.

Once you're done with everything else and you are ready to setup Prey,

1. Install the regular Prey package on the master machine, double clicking on the installer.
2. When the process finishes, close the config dialog. Do not enter your account's credentials. We can't insist enough on this.
3. Disconnect from the internet.
4. Edit the prey.conf file and add your API Key to line 36. The location of the file is /etc/prey/prey.conf
5. Save changes.

Do not connect to the internet.

Now you can deploy the image into other computers. As soon as the new devices connect to the internet they'll be added to your Prey account.

Troubleshooting and Known Issues

1

Cloned Devices From an Unattended Install

Device registration is based on hardware. assign a serial number to all computers they sell, and it ends up being "To Be Filled O.E.M." In this case, Prey won't be able to tell that those are separate devices, and they will share the same device key. That means that a single device entry on your Prey account will manage several computers, the one sharing hardware information.

To prevent this from happening you can disable the "Overwrite devices if their hardware information already exists on this account" option from the Device Management settings and install Prey again. is only available for accounts with 100 or more device slots. If this affects you, please contact us to get it fixed.

2

Cloned Devices From Image Deployment

If the previous case doesn't fix the problem, then it means that you connected the master machine to the internet after installing Prey. That made it create the device on your Prey account, and then it cloned that same configuration all other computers. To fix that, completely uninstall Prey and start again.