Adding The Anywhere Option Back To Gatekeeper

If you are a basic Mac user, you probably don’t even know what gatekeeper is. Probably don’t have much use for it. It’s still a good idea to know about it. You might find that you’ve faced issues related to it in the past, or they may arrive in the future, so stay tuned.

If you use custom software, 3rd party apps, or need to manage your own software installation security, you probably know exactly what gatekeeper is and why its important. Depending on your work flow, it might serve to be quite limiting and irritating.

To be brief, Gatekeeper basically monitors app executions and installs. If you try to run an application that is not from the Apple App Store and/or has not been approved by Apple in some way, the app will be blocked by Gatekeeper and unable to launch. This critically limits what you can run on your Mac. On the other hand it helps to prevent bogus software, virus riddled apps, and other unwanted mess. It also helps to ensure better functionality from the app in question since Apple approves it. Remember, I said ‘helps’. 🙂

In prior Mac operating systems, there was a setting to allow the user to install apps from anywhere, without Gatekeeper interferring in the process. This option was removed in later versions of the OS. Well it’s not completely gone. Apple just disabled it to save the un-informed consumer user.

Well we aren’t THAT, are we? We’re Innovators and we need more control over our devices and work tools, right?

So let’s restore that Gatekeeper Anywhere feature and get back to Innovating!

The gatekeeper settings for app security can be found here:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General

1. Hit the Apple in the Menu Bar. Select ‘System Preferences’ from the drop-down menu.

2. Hit ‘Security & Privacy’.

3. Here, under the ‘General’ tab, is where you can find the settings. There’s only two. But they matter.

4. Click the lock and enter your password.

5. Now you can set it to only run App Store software or include apps by known developers.

Let’s try to run the best app ever and see what happens.

Double-clicking the package to install it throws back an error.

If we navigate to the security settings at:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General

We’ll see that it left a note about blocking the last app that we attempted to install.

Here, we can select ‘Open Anyway’. If we do, the next time we try to run the package, it should get a pass. We’ll run into this issue time and time again with each app we try to install. We’ll have to go through this process each time. Not really a huge deal.

But we’ll be doing this quite often. Plus we can handle our own app security management. At least to this extent, right? If so, we need to add more functionality to Gatekeeper.

Yeah, let’s do that…

1. Open a terminal window.

If you don’t know how, just type ‘terminal’ in the spotlight search tool. The terminal app will pop up in the results. Click it.

2. Type the following command.

sudo spctl – -master-disable

3. Input your password and press ENTER.

*(You won’t see any characters being typed on screen, but it’s working.)

4. Close the terminal window.

Now when you navigate to…

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General

…you’ll notice a new ‘Anywhere option in the allow apps section. Selecting this setting will get rid of the prompt and blocking done by gatekeeper. Now you can install any app you want without interference. As long as it is compatible with your MacOS version.

1. Open a terminal window.

2. Type the following command.

sudo spctl – -master-enable

3. Input your password and press ENTER.

*(You won’t see any characters being typed on screen. But your input is being received.)

4. Close the terminal window.

Now the ‘Anywhere’ option will be removed from Gatekeeper settings. When installing 3rd party apps, you’ll be prompted and they’ll be blocked until you choose ‘Open Anyway’ from the settings.

And we’re outty 5000! Good Luck.

You can also disable the other two options in the gatekeeper settings. If this interests you, check out this guide here.