Bernd's Dotfiles

This repository serves as my way to help me setup and maintain my Mac. It takes the effort out of installing everything manually. Everything needed to install my preferred setup of macOS is detailed in this readme. Feel free to explore, learn and copy parts for your own dotfiles. Enjoy! 😄

A Fresh macOS Setup

These instructions are for when you've already set up your dotfiles. If you want to get started with your own dotfiles you can find instructions below.

Before you re-install

First, go through the checklist below to make sure you didn't forget anything before you wipe your hard drive.

Did you commit and push any changes/branches to your git repositories?
Did you remember to save all important documents from non-iCloud directories?
Did you save all of your work from apps which aren't synced through iCloud?
Did you remember to export important data from your local database?
Did you update mackup to the latest version and ran mackup backup?

Installing macOS cleanly

After going to our checklist above and making sure you backed everything up, we're going to cleanly install macOS with the latest release. Follow this article to cleanly install the latest macOS version.

Setting up your Mac

If you did all of the above you may now follow these install instructions to setup a new Mac.

Update macOS to the latest version with the App Store
Install Xcode from the App Store, open it and accept the license agreement
Install macOS Command Line Tools by running xcode-select --install
Generate a new public and private SSH key and add them to Github
Clone this repo to ~/.dotfiles
Run fresh.sh to start the installation
After mackup is synced with your cloud storage, restore preferences by running mackup restore
Restart your computer to finalize the process

Your Mac is now ready to use!

Note: you can use a different location than ~/.dotfiles if you want. Just make sure you also update the reference in the .zshrc file.

When installing these dotfiles for the first time you'll need to backup all of your settings with Mackup. Install Mackup and backup your settings with the commands below. Your settings will be synced to iCloud so you can use them to sync between computers and reinstall them when reinstalling your Mac. If you want to save your settings to a different directory or different storage than iCloud, checkout the documentation. Also make sure your .zshrc file is symlinked from your dotfiles repo to your home directory.

brew install mackup
mackup backup

Inspiration