<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 a few 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.
Since I've used this playbook to set up something like 20 different Macs, I decided to write up a full 100% from-scratch install for my own reference (everyone's particular install will be slightly different).
Many people have asked me if I often wipe my entire workstation and start from scratch just to test changes to the playbook. Nope! This project is [continuously tested on GitHub Actions' macOS infrastructure](https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook/actions?query=workflow%3ACI).
You can also run macOS itself inside a VM, for at least some of the required testing (App Store apps and some proprietary software might not install properly). I currently recommend:
This project was created by [Jeff Geerling](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/) (originally inspired by [MWGriffin/ansible-playbooks](https://github.com/MWGriffin/ansible-playbooks)).