Ansible for my work macos desktop

Introduction

I love GNU/Linux and I miss it every time I have to use MacOS for work tasks, so I wrote this guide so I can have a repetible procedure to setup my developer workspace using most of the GNU programs I love on MacOS.

We are automating the post-setup process which is all the tasks we run after installing MacOS from scratch.

Objectives

The main objective is to automatically execute the tasks in the post-setup process, personally I run this tasks every time after installing the operating system. We are going to use ansible to deploy:

homebrew core packages
homebrew cask packages
Install GNU CLI Utils
- wget
- curl
- openssl
- readline
- ssh-copy-id
- nmap
- gettext
- gpg2
- mcrypt
- autoconf
- make
Install third party tools
- oh-my-zsh
- firefox
- kitty
Install Virtualization & Cloud Toolkit
- virtualbox
- vagrant
- gcloud
- awscli
- packer
- terraform
- docker
- kubectl
- helm
- drone
Install dotfiles

Requirements

We are going to run all this procedures from the command line, so bash is required, we also need a stable Internet connection to download all packages.

Cloning the repository

First we need to go the directory we are going to work, and clone the repository from gitlab, for example:

$ mkdir ~/data/vcs
$ cd ~/data/vcs
$ git clone https://github.com/jorgearma1982/ansible-my-macos-desktop
$ cd ansible-my-macos-desktop

Installing and Testing Ansible

In order to install ansible, you need to run bin/install-ansible-on-macos.sh, for example:

$ sudo bin/install-ansible-on-macos.sh

This scripts tests localhost connection at the end.

Validating local conection

Now run ansible with local connection to localhost.

$ ansible 127.0.0.1 -c local -m ping

Go to next section to run playbooks.

The playbook

The main playbook is localsystem.yml, let's display it:

$ cat localsystem.yml
---
#
# Playbook: Local System
#

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  user: macos
  become: yes
  roles:
    - common

Running the Ansible playbook

Before you run ansible, plase edit localsystem.yml playbook file, change the variable user with your own username, for example:

$ sed -i 's/ubuntu/jmedina/' localsystem.yml

So, it looks like this:

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  user: jmedina
  become: yes

As you could see in the playbook header, we connect to localhost with the local user jmedina and use sudo to gain privileges, note that become replaces the old sudo parameter.

Running only a group of tasks using tags

If you remember, in the main playbook localsystem.yml we use roles to group task associated to a program, I have tagged every task in the different playbooks for each role, so if you want to run only the task asociated to a rol, use the --tags with a comma separaed list of tags.

Each role includes more that one task, some of the are grouped, task on a role can include more than one tag, here are the main tags:

common: system_settings

Now run ansible with a few simple tasks for system settings:

$ ansible-playbook localsystem.yml -K --tags=system_settings

NOTE: Here we use -K parameter so ansible asks for user password to run tasks with privileges.

Creating new roles

If you want to group lots of tasks with a different purpose, I recommend you to create a dedicated playbook inside a role, you can create a role using the command ansible-galaxy, for example:

First, go inside your main directory on your proyect, we expect a roles directory on the root.

$ cd roles

$ ansible-galaxy init desktop-insync

$ tree desktop-insync/
desktop-insync/
├── defaults
│   └── main.yml
├── files
├── handlers
│   └── main.yml
├── meta
│   └── main.yml
├── README.md
├── tasks
│   └── main.yml
├── templates
├── tests
│   ├── inventory
│   └── test.yml
└── vars
    └── main.yml

8 directories, 8 files

Ansible galaxy will create the role files and directories structure, most of the work is on the tasks directory, inside the main.yml file.

$ vim roles/desktop-insync/tasks/main.yml

Before you can run the tasks on this new role, you have to incluide it on the main playbook, that is localsystem.yml, for example:

$ vim localsystem.yml
---

...
...
...

  roles:
    - common
    - desktop-insync

That is, if you want to clone this repository go ahead, please give feed back if you want to help to improve this.