<imgsrc="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook/master/files/Mac-Dev-Playbook-Logo.png"width="250"height="156"alt="Mac Dev Playbook Logo"/>
This playbook installs and configures most of the software I use on my Mac for web and software development. Some things in macOS are slightly difficult to automate, so I still have some manual installation steps, but at least it's all documented here.
> Note: If some Homebrew commands fail, you might need to agree to Xcode's license or fix some other Brew issue. Run `brew doctor` to see if this is the case.
You can use this playbook to manage other Macs as well; the playbook doesn't even need to be run from a Mac at all! If you want to manage a remote Mac, either another Mac on your network, or a hosted Mac like the ones from [MacStadium](https://www.macstadium.com), you just need to make sure you can connect to it with SSH:
1. (On the Mac you want to connect to:) Go to System Preferences > Sharing.
You can filter which part of the provisioning process to run by specifying a set of tags using `ansible-playbook`'s `--tags` flag. The tags available are `dotfiles`, `homebrew`, `mas`, `extra-packages` and `osx`.
You can override any of the defaults configured in `default.config.yml` by creating a `config.yml` file and setting the overrides in that file. For example, you can customize the installed packages and apps with something like:
My [dotfiles](https://github.com/geerlingguy/dotfiles) are also installed into the current user's home directory, including the `.osx` dotfile for configuring many aspects of macOS for better performance and ease of use. You can disable dotfiles management by setting `configure_dotfiles: no` in your configuration.
It's my hope that I can get the rest of these things wrapped up into Ansible playbooks soon, but for now, these steps need to be completed manually (assuming you already have Xcode and Ansible installed, and have run this playbook).
Many people have asked me if I often wipe my entire workstation and start from scratch just to test changes to the playbook. Nope! Instead, I posted instructions for how I build a [Mac OS X VirtualBox VM](https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-osx-virtualbox-vm), on which I can continually run and re-run this playbook to test changes and make sure things work correctly.
Additionally, this project is [continuously tested on GitHub Actions' macOS infrastructure](https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook/actions?query=workflow%3ACI).