This is a variant of the macos laptop installation installation instructions, that is not limited to macOS and uses spack instead of asdf.

Preparation

The installation will be done with the help of Ansible.

Two machines are involved in the process : the control node and the managed node. Ansible need only be installed on the control node. The managed and control nodes can be the same machine. For any of the two nodes you must first make a regular install of the target OS (e.g. macos, ubuntu, etc…)

During that regular installation you need to :

  • create (at least) one user with admin rights (i.e. the user that can issue sudo commands)
  • change its shell to zsh.

Then the installation process in a nutshell will be :

  • check a few prerequisites
  • (on control node only) install ansible
  • use ansible to automatically install most of the rest, using spack as a package manager mostly
  • finalize a few things manually

Prerequisites

You must turn ssh on the manager node in order for Ansible to be able ssh into your newly installed machine.

Turn ssh on (macOS)

Add terminal to the list of apps which have full access to the disk (in System Preferences/Security & Private/Privacy. And then, from the command line :

sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on

This can also be done in the System Preferences application -> Sharing -> Remote Login.

From now on you should be able to interact with the machine through a simple terminal using ssh.

Install XCode (macOS)

On a Mac you’d probably better off by accepting the fact that developper things go smoother if XCode is installed simply. Using only the command line tools might work in most cases but for some corner cases you might run into (difficult to debug) problems.

Set proper time zone (macOS)

From the command line that would mean something like :

sudo systemsetup -gettimezone
sudo systemsetup -listtimezones
sudo systemsetup -settimezone Europe/Paris
sudo systemsetup -gettimezone

Install Ansible

Refer to the Ansible installation instructions for details, but for macOS that would be :

pip3 install --upgrade pip3
python3 -m pip install --user ansible

Assuming your PATH is not yet modified at this stage, you’ll have to add the local python binary path to it, before being able to use the ansible or ansible-playbook commands. For instance :

path+=$HOME/Library/Python/3.8/bin

for macOS with Python3.8

Clone custom ansible playbooks repository

cd && mkdir -p github.com/aphecetche && cd github.com/aphecetche
git clone https://github.com/aphecetche/ansible

You can check that ansible is working fine (here on the ubuntu-20 managed virtual machine) using :

ansible-playbook -i inventory/localhost -l ubuntu-20 verify.yml --verbose

which should create a ceci-est-un-test file under the user home directory on the target machine.

Automated installation using ansible

From now on most of the installation is to be done by ansible, with the help of spack.

The main playbook is the laptop.yml one which calls in turn other playbooks :

  • bare.yml to install a minimal set of packages, including spack
  • basic.yml to tailor the configuration of zsh, ssh, git, tmux
  • vim.yml which setups vim to work with different programming languages
  • web.yml for web development
  • alice.yml which setups things for developing Alice software
  • mac.yml (macOS only)

bare.yml

ansible-playbook -i inventory/localhost -l localhost bare.yml -K

The minimal set of packages is currently :

  • spack, because it’s needed for all the rest…
  • tmux, because I can no longer work without it ;-)
  • ncdu to get an easy way to assess the disk space taken by things
  • tree to get a “graphical” view of directories
  • environment-modules, because I’m actually using the module command quite a lot
  • ripgrep, because it’s faster and simpler than grep
  • jq to play with json files

The bare role may also need to install distribution-specific packages (in particular to satisfy the requirements of spack, e.g a compiler, etc…), and thus might need the sudo password, hence the -K option of ansible-playbook. Most of the other playbooks do not require to become root, except the web one.

Some other things that I do need are :

  • fzf, because fuzzy finding is great
  • vim, well, because that’s my editor

vim installation is made within the bare role, while its configuration is taken care of by the vim_conf role called by the vim.yml playbook below. fzf is installed by the bare role using the corresponding ansible fzf role.

The bare installation takes quite some time, as spack is compiling things from sources. In particular ripgrep requires the compilation of rust …

The executables of this step are put into a spack view under $HOME/views/bare. That directory is added to the path by the zsh_conf role later on, but meanwhile you should do :

path=($path $HOME/views/bare)

to access those new installs.

Note that at the end of the bare step alone, the spack installation takes about 1 GB.

basic.yml

cd ~/github.com/aphecetche/ansible
ansible-playbook -i inventory/localhost -l localhost basic.yml

will configure zsh, git, ssh, and tmux.

vim.yml

This one is a big one. It configures vim to be used for various programming languages. The basis of the configuration is to use CoC, which itself depends on nodejs (and yarn).

laptop.yml

The laptop playbook is to be executed on localhost (-K will ask for sudo password) :

cd ~/github.com/aphecetche/ansible
ansible-playbook -i inventory/localhost -l localhost laptop.yml -K

Manual steps (macOS)

For those see the macos laptop installation installation instructions.