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 slightly difficult to automate, 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 evolving this set of playbooks over time.

See also:

• Boxen
• Battleschool
• osxc
• MWGriffin/ansible-playbooks (the original inspiration for this project)

Installation

1. Ensure Apple's command line tools are installed (xcode-select --install to launch the installer).
2. Install Ansible.
3. Clone this repository to your local drive.
4. Run $ ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml inside this directory to install required Ansible roles.
5. Run ansible-playbook main.yml -i inventory -K inside this directory. Enter your account password when prompted.

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.

Running a specific set of tagged tasks

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 and osx.

ansible-playbook main.yml -i inventory -K --tags "dotfiles,homebrew"

Overriding Defaults

Not everyone's development environment and preferred software configuration is the same.

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:

homebrew_installed_packages:
  - cowsay
  - git
  - go

mas_installed_apps:
  - { id: 443987910, name: "1Password" }
  - { id: 498486288, name: "Quick Resizer" }
  - { id: 557168941, name: "Tweetbot" }
  - { id: 497799835, name: "Xcode" }

Any variable can be overridden in config.yml; see the supporting roles' documentation for a complete list of available variables.

Included Applications / Configuration (Default)

Applications (installed with Homebrew Cask):

• Docker
• Dropbox
• Fing
• Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Handbrake
• Homebrew
• LICEcap
• LimeChat
• MacVim
• nvALT
• Sequel Pro (MySQL client)
• Skitch
• Slack
• Sublime Text
• Transmit (S/FTP client)
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

Packages (installed with Homebrew):

• autoconf
• bash-completion
• chromedriver
• doxygen
• gettext
• git
• go
• gpg
• hub
• httpie
• iperf
• libevent
• sqlite
• mcrypt
• npm
• nvm
• ssh-copy-id
• cowsay
• readline
• openssl
• pv
• wget
• wrk

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. You can disable dotfiles management by setting configure_dotfiles: no in your configuration.

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 apps that aren't yet in this setup (see below).
4. Remap Caps Lock to Escape (requires macOS Sierra 10.12.1+).
5. Set trackpad tracking rate.
6. Set mouse tracking rate.
7. 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
• Adobe Creative Cloud

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
  

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.

Additionally, this project is continuously tested on Travis CI's macOS infrastructure.

Ansible for DevOps

Check out Ansible for DevOps, which teaches you how to automate almost anything with Ansible.

Author

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