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 a few manual installation steps, but at least it's all documented here.
It was originally forked from Jeff Geerling and customized for my needs.
Installation
-
Ensure Apple's command line tools are installed (
xcode-select --install
to launch the installer). -
- Run the following command to add Python 3 to your $PATH:
export PATH="$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"
- Upgrade Pip:
sudo pip3 install --upgrade pip
- Install Ansible:
pip3 install ansible
- Run the following command to add Python 3 to your $PATH:
-
Clone or download this repository to your local drive.
-
Run
ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
inside this directory to install required Ansible roles. -
Run
ansible-playbook main.yml --ask-become-pass
inside this directory. Enter your macOS account password when prompted for the 'BECOME' password.
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:
- (On the Mac you want to connect to:) Go to System Preferences > Sharing.
- 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 -K --tags "dotfiles,homebrew"
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).
- Install all the apps that aren't yet in this setup (see below).
- 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
This project was created by Jeff Geerling (originally inspired by MWGriffin/ansible-playbooks).