My MacOS Setup

Inspired by Kevin’s recent post on setting up his new laptop on Debian Stretch, I decided that it was time to reset my Mac BookPro to factory settings. I bought it after a year in my thesis and I’ve grown quite a bit since then in my understanding of programming and computers in general. That also meant that I had a lot of accumulated junk!

I also figured that I should do so using a bash script so that I could make this whole process as reproducible as possible for the next time or if I have to change my laptop for some obscure reason! The goal was to obtain a laptop configuration with minimal user input to recreate as exact a replica as possible of the laptop settings I am currently working with.

Full disclosure, I would not have done this without the help of Kevin, Steve and Nicolas, who gave me great resources and part of their own code to set up their Mac!

My laptop

Here is an overview of the laptop I am working with:

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/* Laptop info */
sw_vers
  ProductName: Mac OS X
  ProductVersion: 10.13.5
  BuildVersion: 17F77

/* Hardware info */
system_profiler SPHardwareDataType
  Hardware:

    Hardware Overview:

      Model Name: MacBook Pro
      Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,4
      Processor Name: Intel Core i7
      Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
      Number of Processors: 1
      Total Number of Cores: 4
      L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
      L3 Cache: 6 MB
      Memory: 16 GB
      Boot ROM Version: MBP114.0183.B00

      SMC Version (system): 2.29f24
      Serial Number (system): XXXXXXXXXXXX
      Hardware UUID: XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX

Backups

The only thing I did was to back up the files for my thesis that I only have locally on an external hard drive, which ultimately do not amount to much as most of my files are backed on the cloud. I use a combination of GitHub, MEGASync, Dropbox, ownCloud and Google Drive to manage most of my individual and collaborative projects. This means that the majority of my files can be reaccessed through the web once I’ve reinstalled those software.

Reseting to factory settings

Now the first step was to reset my laptop to factory settings. I googled it and followed most of the instructions found here. I simply did not follow the instructions that targeted time machine, iTunes and iCloud because I had no intention of reinstalling an image of my old laptop or to sell my laptop to someone else.

In essence, here are the steps I followed (but I still recommend reading the detailed documentation here if you wish to go the same route I did):

1. Make sure that my laptop was connected to the internet (not certain that this was fully necessary at this point)
2. Restart in recovery mode: Option + Command + R
3. Erase hard drive:
4. Disk Utility > Continue
5. Select main drive, usually Macintosh HD
6. Erase button
7. Disk Utility > Quit Disk Utility
8. Reinstall MacOS and followed instructions. Note that this took a long while and that the progress bar and calculation time were very uninformative! I did some research and found this. Essentially, the progress bar was not progressing but the files were being loaded anyway. It was just a very long process. I was able to ascertain that things were indeed progressing by looking at the log file (Command + L). Ultimately, this process took a few hours. Happily, I started doing this at night so I slept through it!
9. When I woke up, I simply followed the instructions to set up my laptop, such as my laptop name, passwords, etc.

Setting up my Mac

What came after was reinstalling every software that I needed to reproduce the laptop configuration that I wanted. The script I prepared, which is the core of this post, allows me to install and configure softwares through the terminal and download all the project data I have stored in the cloud.

Software installation is done mostly using the Homebrew, and Cask projects, which are package managers for macOS that allows installation and management of applications on a Mac computer. Homebrew mostly deals with command line software, while Cask is an extension of Homebrew that allows management of graphical applications. Homebrew and Cask can be tapped using brew and brew cask commands in the terminal. See here for some information on their difference and visit the Homebrew website for more information.

The script is not perfect. It still can’t fully execute in one go because I get prompted for credentials for some software (which I plan to remedy on my next setup). I also did have to improve it as I was reinstalling and reconfiguring my laptop, and I will likely keep improving it through time. Ultimately, however, I managed to have an almost fully operational and configured laptop very efficiently.

Building the script and backing up my data did take considerable time, but I started with a very basic understanding of what it meant to reconfigure a laptop. I would not say I’m an expert now, far from it, but the whole process was enlightening and with the script I built I can now easily reset my Mac or a new one just the way I like it, which was the whole point to begin with!

Enjoy!