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Ansible Playbook for Your Macbook Homebrew Packages

ansible-macbook-homebrew

In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to use Ansible for Homebrew Configuration Management. The aim for using Ansible to manage your homebrew packages helps you to have a consistent list of packages on your macbook.

For me personally, when I get a new laptop it’s always a mission to get the same packages installed as what I had before, and ansible solves that for us to have all our packages defined in configuration management.

Install Ansible

Install ansible with python and pip:

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python3 -m pip install ansible==4.9.0

Ansible Configuration

Create the ansible.cfg configuration file:

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[defaults]
inventory = inventory.ini
deprecation_warnings = False

Our inventory.ini will define the information about our target host, which will be localhost as we are using ansible to run against our local target which is our macbook:

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[localhost]
my.laptop  ansible_connection=local

[localhost:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter = /usr/bin/python3

Ansible Playbook

Our playbook homebrew.yaml will define the tasks to add the homebrew taps, cask packages and homebrew packages. You can change the packages as you desire, but these are the ones that I use:

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- hosts: localhost
  name: Macbook Playbook
  gather_facts: False
  vars:
    TFENV_ARCH: amd64
  tasks:
    - name: Ensures taps are present via homebrew
      community.general.homebrew_tap:
        name: ""
        state: present
      with_items:
        - hashicorp/tap

    - name: Ensures packages are present via homebrew cask
      community.general.homebrew_cask:
        name: ""
        state: present
        install_options: 'appdir=/Applications'
      with_items:
        - visual-studio-code
        - multipass
        - spotify

    - name: Ensures packages are present via homebrew
      community.general.homebrew:
        name: ""
        path: "/Applications"
        state: present
      with_items:
        - openssl
        - readline
        - sqlite3
        - xz
        - zlib
        - jq
        - yq
        - wget
        - go
        - kubernetes-cli
        - fzf
        - sshuttle
        - hugo
        - helm
        - kind
        - awscli
        - gnupg
        - kubectx
        - helm
        - stern
        - terraform
        - tfenv
        - pyenv
        - jsonnet
      ignore_errors: yes
      tags:
        - packages

Deploy Playbook

Now you can run the playbook using:

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ansible-playbook homebrew.yaml

Source Code

The code can be found in my github repository: - https://github.com/ruanbekker/ansible-macbook-setup

Thanks

Thanks for reading, feel free to check out my website, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter or follow me at @ruanbekker on Twitter.