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Every place I’ve worked at where I had some control over workforce device management, we had devices shipping from the store directly to the end user, which would get automatically set up once the user logged in with their gsuite creds.
https://install.doctor/ is a higher level option which uses chezmoi.
Can everything live inside a docker thing that you redistribute?
And now everyone has to pay royalties if the end-users don’t know how to run docker without docker desktop
We pre install the licensed corporate tools and universally used tools like np++ and git for windows, and let them figure out the rest. Every time we bring up baseline changes with that group it turns into bikeshed city.
More than onboarding, there is also the question of changing your laptop, and having to setup everything again.
Some pieces of software that help:
- Humble bundle (https://github.com/homebrew/homebrew-bundle) with a `Brewfile` stored in git and shared;
- dump of all dot files in $HOME encrypted and stored in the company's cloud (because it contains ssh private keys, or password manager db, etc);
- All documents are synchronized with OneDrive.
Mostly, there isn't a one-size fits all, but there is a common set of packages that all devs want, but IDE choice is personal, and many other things.
One of the key pieces of Dev Home is Machine Configuration via WinGet Configuration files [1], which are an upgrade from PowerShell DSC, if you've tried that for server configs, with increased support for installing software from WinGet, cloning git repositories (to Windows Dev Drive if you want to allow that). These config files are just YAML files so you could very easily offer starter templates and also allow developers to customize them based on their own preferences. (Also as YAML they could be source controlled in git themselves.)
Some sample configuration files: https://github.com/microsoft/devhome/tree/main/docs/sampleCo...
Microsoft has been iterating on Dev Home pretty rapidly and adds new features regularly (relatively recently it added support to applying the same configuration files to building new virtual machines either locally under Hyper-V or remotely with Microsoft Dev Box).
I've not yet seen a company try to use WinGet Configuration and Dev Home as a company-wide initiative, but I have seen some growing "bottom up" usage as Developers like myself adopt parts of it for our own multi-device needs or virally share YAML snippets among each other for common corporate repos and tools.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/co...
The internal IT team should already have a way to configure security software and such but will also not want to manage a specific group setup for likely a small amount of people.
Reference.
Does that not work any more or is it just not popular ? Any insights as to why not ?
It sets .zshrc, .zshenv, and .zshenv-private for tokens etc.
It also uses Homebrew to install a bunch of packages, then creates various config files.
It works well. Developer setup time went from days to less than 2 hours (corporate VPN is slow)
Edited to add:
Workflow is:
1. Install homebrew, xcode command line tools, Ansible, and then git+credential helper.
2. Clone repo (which ensures the new dev has correct roles/groups to access the repo)
3. Run Ansible.
---
- name: Configure dev macOS
hosts: localhost
vars_prompt:
- name: githubtoken
prompt: What is your github token?
private: false
tasks:
- name: Create variable from brew prefix
ansible.builtin.command: "brew --prefix"
register: brew_prefix
changed_when: false
- name: Update Homebrew
community.general.homebrew:
update_homebrew: true
- name: Install GNU Coreutils
community.general.homebrew:
name: coreutils
state: presentPersonally I dislike Git, and haven't found a git UI I like, so throw whatever you want on there. I am not going to like it, but not because I want something else.
Since you support a range of OSes I assume you would go with a cross platform editor IntelliJ, VSCode or something. Both are fine, and "something" probably is too.
I like beyond compare enough that I bought a personal license for it.
Give them a 100% works out of the box then they can customize the 1 or 2 things they care about.