Tools of the Trade for mac admins

By George Gonzalez

- 2 minutes read - 377 words

What’s in your toolkit?

Over many years of working on Apple Devices we tend to acquire a set of tools, very specialized tools, that fit our purpose. I thought it could be fun to share what is in my toolkit and why.

  1. Packages

I build a lot of custom packages, anything from a single script to a complex deployment package with pre-install and post-install scripts as well as payloads consisting of multiple embedded installers. Packages makes this a breeze, and contains advanced settings such as host architecture for Apple Silicon and Intel installations or adding a developer certificate for security.

  1. iTerm

More configurable than the built-in terminal.

  1. BBEdit

Full featured editor, a Swiss Army knife, git integration, syntax highlighter and much more. I do have to say that VS Code is a close second, but more often than not I find myself “opening with” BBEdit.

  1. Suspicious Package

For those times when you need to know what is inside that box!

  1. Wireshark

There are so many time when you need to look beyond the basics. I can’t count how many times Wireshark has been the key tool to track down complex networking issues. SSL, Kerberos, NFS, all solved with insights provided by Wireshark.

  1. Mist

Having a simple UI to download OS installers when you need to test something specific.

  1. Apple Configurator

There are many uses of course, but lately I have been restoring M1 devices using IPSW files to test hardware\OS version combinations very quickly.

  1. Fusion

Especially on Intel hardware, VMware Fusion is a great tool to quickly iterate on VMs. The latest V13 adds much needed features and is Universal.

  1. UTM

Apple’s native virtualization layer is amazing, and nothing speeds up development and testing like having the ability to spin up a fully functional macOS environment in a few minutes.

  1. Postman

Sure, you can work with APIs directly from the terminal, but Postman makes it a breeze. Postman can help organize all of your APIs in collections, you can export and share them, you can write tests and complex workflows and much more.

As with any toolkit, there are some that have been around for a long time and others that have just been added.

How about you? What are your top tools? Leave you comments below.