Hackers obsess over automation. We want robots to do the grunt work so we can focus on the fun stuff. One area that's ripe for automation that hasn't seen much attention lately is setting up your computer.
Today I want to show you some techniques to apply automation to the setup of your Mac. The goal of this post is to automate 80% of the bootstrapping, allowing you to setup a new Mac in a matter of hours, not days.
Previous Work
There has been previous work done in this area to automate your Mac's setup. Boxen is probably the most notable. Boxen is Github's solution to keeping their teams running similar environments so there aren't as many inconsistencies across boxes. Boxen is a great solution for more mature companies with devops teams , but what about the small startups or the lone hackers? We need a more suitable solution for them.
Our toolbox
This blog post will make use of the following open source tools to automate your Mac:
- Installing Binaries with homebrew
- Installing Apps with homebrew cask
- Backing up and Restoring Configuration with mackup
- Solid Mac defaults for hackers using osx-for-hackers.sh (modified)
- Bringing it all together with dots
Installing Binaries with Homebrew
Homebrew is a community-driven package installer and an essential tool for every hacker's toolkit. Homebrew automates the setup, compiling and linking of binaries. It also makes updating and uninstalling binaries a breeze.
This is the first thing you should install on a fresh mac. Drop this snippet in a bash script to make sure homebrew gets installed:
# Check for Homebrew,
# Install if we don't have it
if test ! $(which brew); then
echo "Installing homebrew..."
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
fi
# Update homebrew recipes
brew update
The next thing you should do is update the unix tools you already have on your mac. This is more relevant than ever since the recent "Shellshock" debacle.
Here's a snippet to update these unix tools:
# Install GNU core utilities (those that come with OS X are outdated)
brew install coreutils
# Install GNU `find`, `locate`, `updatedb`, and `xargs`, g-prefixed
brew install findutils
# Install Bash 4
brew install bash
# Install more recent versions of some OS X tools
brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install homebrew/dupes/grep
You'll also need to update the
$PATH in your ~/.bash_profile in order to use these tools over their Mac counterparts:$PATH=$(brew --prefix coreutils)/libexec/gnubin:$PATH
This establishes a solid foundation for your Mac. You can also install other tools with Homebrew to improve your workflow. Here's what I install:
binaries=(
graphicsmagick
webkit2png
rename
zopfli
ffmpeg
python
sshfs
trash
node
tree
ack
hub
git
)
echo "installing binaries..."
brew install ${binaries[@]}
After you're done, you should clean everything up with:
brew cleanup
Installing Apps with Homebrew Cask
Homebrew Cask is an extension for Homebrew that allows you to automate the installation of Mac Apps and Fonts.
After you have homebrew installed, you'll want to install Homebrew Cask:
brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
The number of apps you can install with Cask is enormous and growing every day. You can take a look at what applications are installable in their caskroom/homebrew-cask repo or you can search for applications from the CLI:
brew cask search /google-chrome/
Everyone's choice of apps will be different, but here is the script I use to install my favorite apps:
# Apps
apps=(
alfred
dropbox
google-chrome
qlcolorcode
screenflick
slack
transmit
appcleaner
firefox
hazel
qlmarkdown
seil
spotify
vagrant
arq
flash
iterm2
qlprettypatch
shiori
sublime-text3
virtualbox
atom
flux
mailbox
qlstephen
sketch
tower
vlc
cloudup
nvalt
quicklook-json
skype
transmission
)
# Install apps to /Applications
# Default is: /Users/$user/Applications
echo "installing apps..."
brew cask install --appdir="/Applications" ${apps[@]}
If you want to install beta versions of things like Chrome Canary or Sublime Text 3, you'll need to tap the
versions cask:brew tap caskroom/versions
Attention Alfred users
One thing you may notice if you're an Alfred user is that you cannot actually launch these apps from Alfred because the actual location of the app is not in
/Applications but in /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/.
To add this path to Alfred, you can run the following command:
brew cask alfred link
Voila!
Bonus: Installing Fonts like a Boss
Cask can also be used to automatically download and install fonts. In order to enable this, you'll need to tap the
fonts cask:brew tap caskroom/fonts
The font recipes are prefixed by
font-*, so if you want to download Roboto, try searching for font-roboto:brew cask search /font-roboto/
Here's how I install fonts:
# fonts
fonts=(
font-m-plus
font-clear-sans
font-roboto
)
# install fonts
echo "installing fonts..."
brew cask install ${fonts[@]}
You can find a full list of the fonts in the caskroom/homebrew-fonts repo.
Mackup
Mackup is a community-driven tool for backing up and restoring system and application settings. You can find the list of applications it supports in the lra/mackup repo.
I haven't had much luck installing Mackup using Homebrew (on Yosemite), but it's easy enough to install with python's
pip:pip install mackup
If
pip is not available, you may need to install python with brew install python.
By default mackup saves your preferences to your Dropbox, so you'll want to setup Dropbox first. Once Dropbox is setup, backing up your settings is simple:
mackup backup
This command will match your installed applications with it's recipes and symlink the settings files to
~/Dropbox/Mackup.
To restore these settings on another Mac or a wiped Mac, simply run:
mackup restore
osx-for-hackers.sh
This script optimizes your Mac's settings for hackability. It disables many of the annoying defaults Macs have, speeds up the keyboard repeat rate and window animations, and applies many other tweaks.
This script should not be run without prior examination. It's quite opinionated and intended to be modified. You can find the version I modified here:
This version makes the script more idempotent, removing a lot of the prompts that I'd like to handle in other places.
dots(1)
dots(1) is a script I wrote to glue these concepts together. It's intended to be the first thing you install on your Mac (or Ubuntu server). It has no outside dependencies and works on many different distributions. To get the binary, simply run:
(mkdir -p /tmp/dots && cd /tmp/dots && curl -L# https://github.com/matthewmueller/dots/archive/master.tar.gz | tar zx --strip 1 && sh ./install.sh)
To boot up your Mac with sensible defaults, you can run:
dots boot osx
dots(1) is very much a work in progress, but I'm hoping to align the community's efforts around creating robust tools to quickly bootstrap new hacker-friendly machines.
Conclusion
By setting up automation, you can get up and running on a new Mac faster, you will stay up to date with the latest security fixes and you can minimize inconsistencies among your teammate's computers.
What are your favorite tools for automation? Leave a comment!
If you're interested in this kind of stuff or in our other work, you should get in touch.
Happy automating!
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