New year, new laptop
A couple of days ago, I accidentally dropped my old laptop on the floor. It was an old Macbook Pro from mid 2010, which I’ve upgraded a couple of times by swapping a HDD to a SDD and then by doubling the RAM twice. I had 1TB storage and 16GB of memory, but the old processor was starting to age. After almost 8 years of service, its life came to an end.
After weighting the options, I decided to go for a Macbook Pro 15 inches, and while it was being delivered, I spent some time updating my setup scripts. It used to be a shell script calling Homebrew directly, but I recently stumble upon Homebrew bundle and decided to use that instead. It was a good opportunity to review what I no longer needed and what was missing from it.
When I received the new machine, I downloaded the files from there and ran the entry point bash script, and it worked great. The settings were restored using mackup, which I’m glad I’ve set it up recently.
However, I had a lot of environments setup in Insomnia (an alternative to Postman which I prefer), and sadly mackup didn’t carry them over. It’s probably not supporting that (yet?), so it might be an opportunity to improve this great project. My preferences from PyCharm were not fully backed up either, it looks like something changed recently as other people have reported a similar problem in Jetbrains products.
I also use Cerebro which is bit like Spotlight on steroids. The current Homebrew version (0.3.2) is crashing, so I had to grab the previous version and install it manually. I couldn’t find how to install a specific cask version. Hopefully this issue will be resolved soon. Also, it looks like Docker for Mac is not installable via Homebrew, I had to go and get it from their website.
Lastly, there is still a chicken and egg situation where I need to login to Dropbox first, which requires the password from 1password, which settings are backed up in mackup.
I’m very satisfied overall, the setup has been almost entirely automated.
UPDATE: I’ve submitted a pull request to Mackup to add support for Insomnia, as it was very simple to do, and it just got merged!
UPDATE II: Since the Cerebro issue seems to be stuck, I’ve sent a PR to homebrew-cask to revert the 0.3.2 upgrade and install 0.3.1 instead.