Bootstraping my mac with ansible

  • 12th Feb 2025
  • 2 min read
  • Tags: 
  • IaC, 
  • Ansible

I recently purchased a Macbook and decided to finally take the time to setup a repeatable bootstrap process.

I initially considered writing my own ansible playbook, but ultimately settled on the amazing mac-dev-playbook from Jeff Geerling. Here are the steps I took to get this going.

Pre-requisites

  1. Open a terminal window and type xcode-select --install. Follow prompts to install the command line tools.

  2. Install Ansible

    • 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

  3. Clone repo with
    git clone https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook.git

  4. Install required Ansible roles.
    cd mac-dev-playbook && ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Customization

Jeff Geerling provides a sample config file, but I don't need everything there so I modified it to suit my current needs. My config file looks like this:

homebrew_taps:
  - common-fate/granted
  - hashicorp/tap

homebrew_installed_packages:
  - git
  - go
  - mise
  - zsh-history-substring-search
  - terraform
  - granted
  - gh
  - zola
  - awscli

homebrew_cask_appdir: /Applications
homebrew_cask_apps:
  - firefox@nightly
  - visual-studio-code
  - google-chrome
  - orbstack
  - rectangle
  - alt-tab

mas_installed_apps:
  - { id: 497799835, name: "Xcode" }

configure_dock: true
dockitems_remove:
  - Launchpad
  - News
  - Keynote
  - Numbers
  - Pages
  - "App Store"
  - Freeform
  - Reminders
  - Notes
dockitems_persist:
  - name: "Code"
    path: "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app"
    pos: 15

As I need other tools, I will simply add them to the relevant section, but for now, this is enough to get started with. You may notice I'm not using ansible/brew to install rbenv, npm, pyenv or java. That's because imho mise is the best tool for managing these. If you're unfamiliar with mise, see the getting-started, tasks, and cookbooks sections for a sense of how mise can make your life easier.

Deployment

Run the command below and enter you macOS account password when prompted for the 'BECOME' password.
ansible-playbook main.yml --ask-become-pass