Looking for ideas here! New machine will be on OS X. I am currently playing around with Ansible and for now I am able to set up much of the non-dev applications + `pnpm`, `ruby`, `go`. (I based a lot of it on https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook as I wanted to learn Ansible anyway).
Thank you!
First, using Ansible for setting up a single Mac is way overkill. Jeff's only doing it because he literally wrote the book on Ansible. For a single Mac where you want reproducible, just use shell script(s).
Anyway, for my Ansible environment for servers and network devices, I use uv[1]. It works flawlessly.
If I were doing things even more right, I'd host it in a container, but I don't have time for all that right now.
And nobody's mentioned Homebrew[2], yet.
PS: OS X is now called macOS, and at least in some parts, "OS X" is still used to refer to really old OS releases and may generate some confusion.
For me, the most important part would be to import my dotfiles/custom scripts via chezmoi. And installing Homebrew. The rest (e.g. install Firefox) I would probably do manually.
By restoring from previous machine’s time machine backup apparently.
If it’s a working mac - by following corporate guides.
I wonder why complicate your life?
Brewfile
For Ubuntu, not Mac, but I maintain a set of 3 shell scripts over at https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu that put 95% of everything I use on an everyday basis.
I picked shell scripts specifically because I didn't want the overhead of installing eg Ansible, even if its idempotency would be nice. I definitely like Ansible for DevOps on virtual machines, though, it's a solid platform.