Use osx_defaults module for part of .osx provisioning

[CherryKitten]

I found it very weird that many people who provision their Macs using Ansible still use a bash script (the .osx dotfile) to set some settings.

That's why I started looking into converting all of that into Ansible tasks, because replacing all bash scripts with Ansible seems to be a good thing to do.

At the moment this change allows to move all defaults commands from the .osx script to the config.yml for this playbook. Other parts of the .osx script will be harder to implement, because I did not find readily usable roles or modules for those yet.

This Task is configured by the variable osx_defaults and activated by setting osx_use_defaults to true. I have also added osx_use_dotfile to determine if the .osx script should be run. The default behaviour of the playbook should not have changed. So if you merge this and don't touch your custom config, everything should be the same as before.

The osx_defaults variable is a list of defaults that can be directly transcribed from the defaults command used in many .osx scripts, for example:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleInterfaceStyle -string "Dark"

becomes

osx_defaults:
  - { domain: NSGlobalDomain, key: AppleInterfaceStyle, type: string, value: Dark }

Feel free to propose changes do this, including ideas about how to implement the commands pmset, launchctl and tmutil via Ansible.

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[geerlingguy]

Thanks! This is much cleaner than the .osx-style defaults settings.

[cbrunnkvist]

The biggest limitation I see with using the osx_defaults module is that it does not support the dict, even less so nested dict of dicts (ansible/ansible/issues/24028) which are required in some cases. The defaults command doesn't either: apps access these settings through the native *Kit frameworks, and for shell access the only way I have been able to discover is the OS-bundled PlistBuddy.

Here's how I set default window size for the builtin Pro terminal theme:

- name: 'Enable Opt-(left, right, backspace) as Meta-key and other Terminal.app defaults'
  command: '/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "{{ item }}" $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist'
  loop:
    - "set 'Startup Window Settings' Pro"
    - "set 'Default Window Settings' Pro"
    - 'set :Window\ Settings:Pro:useOptionAsMetaKey true'
    - 'set :Window\ Settings:Pro:columnCount 120'
    - 'set :Window\ Settings:Pro:rowCount 30'

[geerlingguy]

@cbrunnkvist - even so, moving the simple changes to the Ansible module should make it easier to maintain some dot file settings (I say this as I'm trying to update my .osx for Sonoma, heh).