Any advice on declarative macOS configuration?

I’ve had a great experience with Nix

I just use a shell scripts with defaults write commands and for software, I use a Brewfile for Homebrew. Mostly works well.

Battle hardened and somewhat cynical opinion. Keep a virtual machine, set it up once, keep track of every click and command, then you have a run list.

It’s up to you if it’s worth it to lift that to a higher level of abstraction. Your test is just bash bats tests from a clean virtual machine + setup script. Keep a Brewfile if you want to define a version set that way.

Because it’s a domain that is not as well developed when it comes to tooling, I think the sober advice of just be disciplined about your recipe and roll a VM til it’s right is probably less time consuming than googling what’s wrong with some unpolished / sharp edges tool.

knl

21 hours ago

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I’m using home-manager (Nix): https://github.com/knl/dotskel. Even though I would like to avoid wasting 6 minutes to manually install apps and instead spend 6 hours to fail to automate it, I didn’t get to it. Thus, I keep a list of the apps that I need to install (README is essentially a runbook).

In the past I had positive experiences with JAMF stack, where I would just push a bunch of scripts to configure the machines. Almost declarative, since there are many scripts available online :)

I just moved my configuration to chezmoi, leveraging defaults.sh to export settings into bash scripts. This is the best setup I’ve found thus far.

abathur

edited 9 hours ago

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I’m not sure how feasible it is without cobbling things together. I did recently stumble on https://twocanoes.com/products/mac/mac-deploy-stick/ but I’m not sure if it’s really an option. If the other options aren’t desirable, I guess it’s at least worth looking at. :)

I feel like I have my bootstrapping process worked out fairly well (i.e., I’m pretty happy with the result), but it’s got a substantive amount of shell gluing together my dotfile manager/dotfiles, Nix+nix-darwin, brew bundle (just for casks), fiddling settings that aren’t covered by that (some OS, some app-specific), and restoring some stuff from backups. This is pretty good in the sense that everything I regularly fiddle with flows through Nix. The brewfile almost never changes. OS settings almost never change.

I’ve also been slowly building a component that roughly meets the inverse need of the bootstrap: it accumulates the knowledge I need to get myself back off of a system as quickly as feasible without missing/losing things. I run it alongside my backups and save the result, and also manually when I’m actively working on triaging issues it has found. It’s a hodgepodge, but a few broad-stroke examples are:

• audit ~/ for new dirs/files that I haven’t previously triaged
• auto-commit things in my dotfiles that churn with regular use (apps that fiddle their own configs, history/state files, etc.)
• print reminders of all of the little nagging anxieties that I have looked into in the past and verified don’t need action

Do you use brewfiles? That takes care of WHAT is installed pretty well.

Packages come and go though, especially after the great pruning. They are also not versioned for the most part.

They do support App Store apps, docker images, and individual options for casks (so you can globally install or locally install).

Then, for config, I started at a feature full dotfiles that includes a bunch of good defaults write commands, command line config, and terminal utilities: https://github.com/skwp/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/macos

Most of the rest is actually very importantly not changed. With macos there isn’t a ton to configure anyhow, but when you work with other people or on another person’s machine, you end up wanting either your settings or the default macos settings. When that host crashes, or I want to sit down at any machine, it’s pretty much:

Git clone homebrew
Git clone bundlefile/localdotfiles
Brew bundle
Git clone skwp/dotfiles
Rake install
Restart terminal
Macos script
Reboot

All of which I can do from memory and I’m 99% productive.

kbd

edited 10 hours ago

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For years I’ve used my custom setup program to manage my Macs. I source control everything possible and it helps keeps my home/work computers in sync and lets me bootstrap a new machine asap.

Here’s its config and you can see how it has configuration for every package manager. Each section of the config translates into a command-line argument for setup, so, for example, I can type setup brew and it uses brew bundle to install all my Homebrew packages and then runs post-install steps. All the packages for each package manager are in the conf directory.

Finally, there’s a ‘manual’ section that can install software without a package manager by checking out a git repository or downloading a tarball and then building the software.