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 playbook 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:

   1. Add the following to your ~/.zshrc file (create one if you don't have one):

      export PATH="$HOME/Library/Python/3.8/bin:$PATH"
      

   2. Source the new profile: source ~/.zshrc

   3. Install Ansible: pip3 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 --ask-become-pass 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.

Use with a remote Mac

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, 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.
2. Enable 'Remote Login'.

You can also enable remote login on the command line:

sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on

Then edit the inventory file in this repository and change the line that starts with 127.0.0.1 to:

[ip address or hostname of mac]  ansible_user=[mac ssh username]

If you need to supply an SSH password (if you don't use SSH keys), make sure to pass the --ask-pass parameter to the ansible-playbook command.

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, extra-packages 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" }

composer_packages:
  - name: hirak/prestissimo
  - name: drush/drush
    version: '^8.1'

gem_packages:
  - name: bundler
    state: latest

npm_packages:
  - name: webpack

pip_packages:
  - name: mkdocs

configure_dock: true
dockitems_remove:
  - Launchpad
  - TV
dockitems_persist:
  - name: "Sublime Text"
    path: "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/"
    pos: 5

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):

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

Packages (installed with Homebrew):

• autoconf
• bash-completion
• doxygen
• gettext
• gifsicle
• git
• go
• gpg
• hub
• httpie
• iperf
• libevent
• sqlite
• mcrypt
• nmap
• node
• nvm
• php
• ssh-copy-id
• cowsay
• readline
• openssl
• pv
• wget

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. Install Sublime Package Manager.
2. Remap Caps Lock to Escape (requires macOS Sierra 10.12.1+).
3. Set trackpad tracking rate.
4. Set mouse tracking rate.
5. Configure extra Mail and/or Calendar accounts (e.g. Google, Exchange, etc.).

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 GitHub Actions' 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).