Mac Development Ansible Playbook

This playbook installs and configures most of the software I use on my Mac for web and software development. Some things in macOS are difficult to automate (notably, the Mac App Store and certain tools from Apple), so I still have some manual installation steps, but at least it's all documented here.

This is a work in progress, and is mostly a means for me to document my current Mac's setup. I'll be adding settings and packages to this set of playbooks over time.

See also:

• Battleschool is a more general solution than what I've built here. (It may be a better option if you don't want to fork this repo and hack it for your own workstation...).
• osxc is another more general solution, set up so you can fork the xc-custom repo and get your own local environment bootstrapped quickly.
• MWGriffin/ansible-playbooks was the original inspiration for this repository, but this project has since been completely rewritten.

Installation

1. Install Ansible.
2. Ensure Apple's command line tools are installed (xcode-select --install to launch the installer).
3. Clone this repository to your local drive.
4. Run the command $ ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.txt inside this directory to install required Ansible roles.
5. Run ansible-playbook main.yml -i inventory -u [username] --ask-sudo-pass from the same directory as this README file (substitute [username] for your macOS account username.

Included Applications / Configuration

Applications (installed with Homebrew Cask):

• Adium
• BetterTouchTool
• Google Chrome
• Dropbox
• Firefox
• Handbrake
• Homebrew
• Karabiner
• LICEcap
• MacVim
• Menu Meters
• nvALT
• Sequel Pro (MySQL client)
• Skype
• Skitch
• Seil
• Sublime Text
• TextMate
• TimeMachineEditor
• Tower (Git client)
• Transmit (S/FTP client)
• Vagrant (+ Vagrant Manager)
• VirtualBox
• VLC

Packages (installed with Homebrew):

• ansible
• autoconf
• gettext
• libevent
• packer
• python
• sqlite
• mysql
• php56 (+ php56-xdebug)
• ssh-copy-id
• cowsay
• ios-sim
• readline
• subversion
• kdiff3
• openssl
• pv
• drush
• wget
• brew-cask

My 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.

Finally, there are a few other preferences and settings added on for various apps and services.

Future additions

Things that still need to be done manually

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).

1. Set JJG-Term as the default Terminal theme (it's installed, but not set as default automatically).
2. Install Sublime Package Manager.
3. Install all the Mac App Store Apps (see below).
4. Install all the apps that aren't yet in this setup (see below).
5. Remap Caps Lock to Escape (keycode 53), using Seil.
6. Set trackpad tracking rate.
7. Set mouse tracking rate.
8. Configure extra Mail and/or Calendar accounts (e.g. Google, Exchange, etc.).

Applications/packages to be added:

These are mostly direct download links, some are more difficult to install because of custom installers or other nonstandard install quirks:

• iShowU HD

Configuration to be added:

• I have vim configuration in the repo, but I still need to add the actual installation:

  mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload
  mkdir -p ~/.vim/bundle
  cd ~/.vim/autoload
  curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tpope/vim-pathogen/master/autoload/pathogen.vim > pathogen.vim
  cd ~/.vim/bundle
  git clone git://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git
  

Apps only available via the App Store

I also use the following apps at least once or twice per week, but unfortunately, as the Mac App Store is not able to be controlled via CLI, or any other way I can find (so far), I have to manually install all of these apps from within the App Store application.

• Tweetbot
• RadarScope
• Pixelmator
• Quick Resizer
• 1Password
• DaisyDisk
• Byword
• Aperture
• Pages
• Keynote
• Numbers

There are a couple other apps I'm leaving out of the list, like Microsoft Word, because I normally don't install them unless/until I need them.

Testing the 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, on which I can continually run and re-run this playbook to test changes and make sure things work correctly.

Ansible for DevOps

Check out Ansible for DevOps, which will teach you how to do some other amazing things with Ansible.

Author

Jeff Geerling, 2014 (originally inspired by MWGriffin/ansible-playbooks).