Setting Up a New Mac

Published: Friday, April 25, 2025This guide outlines the process of configuring a new macOS system.

Running Migration Assistant

Apple provides Migration Assistant to facilitate the transfer of documents, applications, user accounts, and settings from an old Mac to a new one. This saves time by eliminating the need to manually edit settings using the defaults command and navigating the App Store.

Configuring Development Tools

Previously, configuring development tools was a time-consuming process. However, I have developed a POSIX shell script that automates the cloning of dotfiles to ~/.config and the symbolic linking of relevant files for zsh, git, and vim to my home directory.

# Clone Configuration Files and Symlink to Home Directory
git clone https://github.com/maclong9/dots .config
for file in .config/.*; do
	case “$(basename “$file”)” in
		“.” | “..” | “.git”) continue ;;
		*) ln -s “$file” “$HOME/$(basename “$file”)” ;;
	esac
done

The script also configures my SSH keys:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C “[email protected]” -f “$HOME/.ssh/id_ed25519” -N “”
eval “$(ssh-agent -s)”
mkdir ~/.ssh
printf ‘Host github.com\n\tAddKeysToAgent yes\n\tIdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519” > ~/.ssh/config
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub | pbcopy

macOS Specific Set Up

Enabling Touch ID for sudo Commands in the Terminal
Installing Xcode Developer Tooling

# Check if running on macOS
if [ “$(uname -s)” = “Darwin” ]; then
    # Enable Touch ID for `sudo`
    sudo cp /etc/pam.d/sudo_local.template /etc/pam.d/sudo_local
    sudo sed -i ‘’ ‘3s/^#//‘ /etc/pam.d/sudo_local

    # Install Developer Tools
    ! xcode-select -p >/dev/null 2>&1 && xcode-select —install
    ! /usr/bin/xcrun clang >/dev/null 2>&1 && sudo xcodebuild -license accept
fi

Installing Additional Tools

At the time of writing, the following additional tools are required:

Swift List: A simple recreation of the UNIX ls command written in Swift.
Deno: A full replacement for Node.js and npm, suitable for my TypeScript projects.

 # Install Swift List
sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin
sudo curl -L https://github.com/maclong9/list/releases/download/v1.1.2/sls -o /usr/local/bin/sls
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sls

# Deno
curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh | sh;

You can view my full configuration and script here as well as a brief explanation of some of the tools I use and why on this post.

Once these two steps are done I can go back to working as if nothing changed and I am still running on my old laptop just with the updated macOS and MacBook features.