Hiding Developer Tools in the Parallels Desktop GUI

Parallels Desktop Enterprise, Business, and Pro editions include developer tools which are aimed at software developers using Parallels Desktop as part of their development and testing setup. The tools are accessed by clicking the Develop menu on the virtual machine menu bar and then choosing one of the available options (e.g. Start SSH Session, Start Debugging Session, and others). If users in your organization are not using these tools, you can hide the Develop menu altogether. The reason you would want to do this, some of these features (if used accidentally) may start a debugging session or engage in some other development-specific activities that may temporarily disrupt normal Parallels Desktop operation.

Note: If some of the Parallels Desktop users in your organization use it for software development tasks, they may benefit from reading our Developer's Guide.

This option is a part of a virtual machine configuration and can be set using the Parallels graphical user interface as follows:

1. Open the virtual machine configuration dialog (click the gear icon or choose Actions > Configure).

2. In the dialog, click Options (at the top) and then click More Options in the left pane.

3. In the right pane, select or clear the Show developer tools option. This will show or hide the Develop menu on the virtual machine menu bar (you don't have to restart a virtual machine if it's running).

To modify this setting from the command line, execute the following command in Terminal:

prlctl set ID|Name --show-dev-tools on|off

where ID/Name is the GUID or name of a target virtual machine.

When mass deploying Parallels Desktop on Mac computers in your organization, you can configure the autodeploy package to apply these settings to all included virtual machines automatically. For details, see Configuring deployment options.