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A Fresh macOS Setup

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 not forget any important documents in non-iCloud directories?
  • Did you save all of your work in apps which aren't synced through iCloud?
  • Did you not forget 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.

Setting up your Mac

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

  1. Update macOS to the latest version with the App Store
  2. Install Xcode from the App Store, open it and accept the license agreement
  3. Install macOS Command Line Tools by running xcode-select --install
  4. Copy public and private SSH keys to ~/.ssh and make sure they're set to 600
  5. Clone this repo to ~/.dotfiles
  6. Append /usr/local/bin/zsh to the end of your /etc/shells file
  7. Run install.sh to start the installation
  8. Restore preferences by running mackup restore
  9. 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.

Your Own Dotfiles

If you want to start your own dotfiles from this setup, it's pretty easy to do so. First of all you'll need to fork this repo. After that you can tweak it the way you want.

Go through the .macos file and adjust the settings to your liking. You can find much more settings at the original script by Mathias Bynens and Kevin Suttle's macOS Defaults project.

Check out the Brewfile file and adjust the apps you want to install for your machine. Use their search page to check if the app you want to install is available.

Check out the aliases.zsh file and add your own aliases. If you need to tweak your $PATH check out the path.zsh file. These files get loaded in because the $ZSH_CUSTOM setting points to the .dotfiles directory. More info about how to customize oh-my-zsh can be found here.

One thing you'll need to do manually is add your ~/.zshrc file. You can't symlink the .zshrc file from your dotfiles because Mackup will already symlink your .zshrc from your home directory. That's why we'll need to create the file manually. Add the contents below to a .zshrc file in your user directory. What it will do is load the .zshrc file from your dotfiles. Make sure that the path to your dotfiles is correct.

# Load Zsh
source ~/.dotfiles/.zshrc

I've thought about backing up the .zshrc file entirely to Mackup and removing it from this repo. But I like it to be versioned with the repo so I can use it for documentation and as an example. I also believe that it makes more sense to keep it in this repo because it's pretty tied into this repo's files and settings.

When installing these dotfiles for the first time you'll need to backup all of your settings with Mackup. Install and backup your settings with the command 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.

brew install mackup
mackup backup