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Ansible Role - Mac Setup

This repo contains an Ansible role that configures Matthew Ahrenstein's personal preferences and settings on a new out-of-the-box Mac.
This drastically speeds up how long it takes to setup a new Mac for me.

Apple Silicon

Right now this Ansible role is tested against Sonoma on Apple Silicon Macs only.

Monterey and MDM

This repository is tested against machines enrolled in MDM via DEP with a configuration profile that allowlists system extensions from the following vendor IDs:

Vendor Name Team ID KEXT IDs
VMware EG7KH642X6 (ALL)
Rogue Amoeba 7266XEXAPM /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/ACE.driver

If these are not allowlisted ahead of running this role, you may have to approve system extensions as prompts come up. This is due to some of the Homebrew casks that get installed.
Additionally, on Apple Silicon computers you must enable Reduced Security ahead of running this to allow the Rogue Amoeba apps to install.

Requirements

To configure a machine you must have the following:

  1. macOS Monterey (14.0) or later (This may work on earlier versions, but only the latest is tested)
  2. The account you're using must be an Admin
  3. Internet access
  4. Homebrew pre-installed
  5. Ansible pre-installed via Homebrew

Limitations

  1. This role is not meant to be run against remote machines
  2. This role will prompt for the logged in user's password in order to use sudo for the Homebrew steps
  3. Logging out after the role completes is recommended as some settings don't apply until a new login occurs

Variables

There are a few variables defined in this role

The following variables should be changed as they default to my identity:

  1. full_name - Your first and last name
  2. email - Your email address
  3. gpg_short_id - Your GPG key's short ID

Changing the following variables is less required but are still very personal in taste:

  1. homebrew_taps - Change the default taps installed
  2. homebrew_packages - Change the default brews that are installed
    1. intel_brews - Will deploy some brews that only work on Intel Macs although this is largely untested.
  3. homebrew_casks - Change the default casks that are installed
    1. intel_casks - Will deploy some casks that only work on Intel Macs although this is largely untested.
  4. licenses - Change this to true to run the licenses tasks (You will also need to populate the below licensing variables)

Licensing variables:

  1. loopback_license and loopback_name - Licensing info for Rogue Amoeba's Loopback
  2. audiohijack_license and audiohijack_name - Licensing info for Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack
  3. soundsource_license and soundsource_name - Licensing info for Rogue Amoeba's SoundSource
  4. fission_license and fission_name - - Licensing info for Rogue Amoeba's Fission
  5. farrago_license and farrago_name - Licensing info for Rogue Amoeba's Farrago
  6. viscosity_license - Licensing info for Viscosity VPN Client
  7. commandq_license - Licensing info for CommandQ (The format is email,license key encoded in base64 with no new line)

Running this role locally

To run this role against the local machine simply run ansible-playbook playbook-local.yml -i local.inventory
To go from zero (no Homebrew or Ansible) to 100% you can optionally run something like devops-mac which uses this role.

Testing

This role is manually tested against VMs.
TESTING.md contains details and instructions for testing.