Using ScriptKit to Automate Mac Setup

Jhey Tompkins
Jhey TompkinsView on GitHub

Howdy y'all! ＼ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ／

I decided I'd have one of those "tech" weekends where I get all my tech in order 😅 A big part of this was getting my machines onto Big Sur with a blank slate and revisiting what things I install etc.

For the last few years, I've been using Kody which is something I built with Node. It's one of those "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" kinda things. It works great but once I saw "ScriptKit", that was kinda the thing I envisioned those years ago. The GUI part is a bonus!

Enough ramble. How did it go? What's my process?

  1. Fresh Big Sur install on clean machine.
  2. Install ScriptKit
  3. That prompts Git installation 👍
  4. Install HomeBrew
  5. Install VSCode (Doing this so I can mess about with scripts before running them). Imagine there would be a way to automate the steps from 4 onwards.
  6. Use Terminal to add a remote for my scripts.
  7. Switch to that branch.
  8. This part was a bit of a sticker. I want to run my setup scripts (there a little rough, don't judge! 😅 ) from the CLI initially so I can see what's happening. But, I'm not version controlling the bin files. Perhaps there is an automated way for me to do this. Who am I kidding? Of course there is, this is ScriptKit. But, I didn't know if there was an API I could tap into to say "Hey! Here's my scripts I brought with me. Can you hook them up to bin please?" 8a. Make a couple of tweaks to cli. Expose basename from path and rm from shelljs. Expose iterm as a global for CodePen script.
  9. Then I do a bit of a dance with setting the path in .zshrc 😅
  10. Run each of my scripts. One installs all my Homebrew packages from a config file, another symlinks all my dotfiles(which I'm currently keeping in a folder within scripts 😅 ). That sets up my VSCode, sets up my Git Config, ZSH, etc. Then I have another script that runs a shell script with my OSX defaults like hide the dock, set up exposé, etc. And lastly, a script that installs global npm modules, installs VSCode extensions, etc.
  11. Lastly, grab my iTerm config and Stream Deck backups from within the "scripts" folder and apply them too.
  12. 🎉 Machine ready for action.

I'm thrilled it works. My scripts are a little "rough" around the edges 😅

But, as a POC, it works! And this saved me hours of doing this myself and remembering things I install or set up. Migrating what I had already wasn't much hassle at all.

I've had some thoughts too about ways I could make this easier to sync what I'm using too.

  • Make an install script that updates my config for me upon successful HomeBrew package install 🤩 Same with uninstall.
  • Script to grab iTerm profile for me and copy it into my branch.

Another note. The file selector didn't work for me still 🤔 I'm not sure what's going on there.

This was great fun to put together and was totally worth spending the time on to get my tech in order 💪

Thanks @johnlindquist 🙏 Keep up the great work!