Hi HN, I built OpenBoot because I was tired of spending half a day setting up every new Mac.
The problem: you get a new machine (or wipe yours), then spend hours running brew install 50 times, cloning dotfiles, configuring your shell, setting macOS preferences. I've done this enough times to automate it.
OpenBoot is a single curl command that gives you an interactive TUI to pick from 70+ curated dev tools across 3 presets (minimal, developer, full). CLI tools install in parallel (4x), GUI apps install sequentially since they need password prompts. Anything already installed gets skipped. It also sets up Oh-My-Zsh with sensible aliases, deploys your dotfiles via GNU Stow, and configures developer-friendly macOS preferences.
There's also a web dashboard at openboot.dev where you can build a custom config, import from a Brewfile, and share it with your team via a short URL.
Tech stack: Go + Charmbracelet (bubbletea) for the TUI, SvelteKit + Cloudflare for the web. MIT licensed, zero telemetry.
Some things I'm still working on: the TUI interactive package selector isn't shown in the README demo yet (it's the best part, working on a better recording). Rollback support is half-built. Linux support isn't planned — this is intentionally macOS-only.
Happy to answer questions about the implementation or take feedback.
Hi HN, I built OpenBoot because I was tired of spending half a day setting up every new Mac.
The problem: you get a new machine (or wipe yours), then spend hours running brew install 50 times, cloning dotfiles, configuring your shell, setting macOS preferences. I've done this enough times to automate it.
OpenBoot is a single curl command that gives you an interactive TUI to pick from 70+ curated dev tools across 3 presets (minimal, developer, full). CLI tools install in parallel (4x), GUI apps install sequentially since they need password prompts. Anything already installed gets skipped. It also sets up Oh-My-Zsh with sensible aliases, deploys your dotfiles via GNU Stow, and configures developer-friendly macOS preferences.
There's also a web dashboard at openboot.dev where you can build a custom config, import from a Brewfile, and share it with your team via a short URL.
Tech stack: Go + Charmbracelet (bubbletea) for the TUI, SvelteKit + Cloudflare for the web. MIT licensed, zero telemetry.
Some things I'm still working on: the TUI interactive package selector isn't shown in the README demo yet (it's the best part, working on a better recording). Rollback support is half-built. Linux support isn't planned — this is intentionally macOS-only.
Happy to answer questions about the implementation or take feedback.