My personal scripts for migrating to a new Mac.

Migration Assistant is for chumps. Do you really trust it? Can you be without a computer for the many many hours it's going to take telling you it has just 30 mins to go?

On current box, capture list of installed homebrew packages and casks into files in your $HOME:

cd
brew list > brew-pkgs.txt
brew casks list > brew-casks.txt

On the new box, rsync to pull all your files over:

rsync -avv oldcomp:/Users/$USER /Users/

(keep an eye on long batches of crud you should probably clean out, particularly .dotdirs and ~/Library/App Support/*)

At this point you can keep working on old box while the lengthy sync and installs takes place.

Once at least those brew-*.txt files are synced, you can install software.

On new box, install Homebrew (crazy curl | sh way or download an installer). Then install pkgs and casks:

cd
cat brew-pkgs.txt | xargs -L 1 brew install
cat brew-casks.txt | xargs -L 1 brew cask install

Sync any other needed data, manually copy apps that don't have casks. E.g. I keep my music and videos in /Users/Shared

rsync -avv oldcomp:/Users/Shared /Users/

After the first sync is complete, close everything, logout of old box, and do final sync to catch last minute changes.

rsync -avv oldcomp:/Users/$USER /Users/

Reboot new box, login, and things should look mostly like they did on old box.

• Launchbar (or Alfred) needs to be told your apps are in /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom
• Licenses for many things don't get carried over for some reason. ** some might have been due to installing more recent versions via brew cask
• In this case I moved from Mavericks to Yosemite in the process, so bunch of prefs to tweak.

To make this easier in the future:

• Symlink .dotdirs (e..g .npm) to /usr/local/dotcaches or similar
• split iPhoto lib and archive in pieces
• make/find a script to prune caches everywhere
• Store all licenses in 1password
• backup /etc just in case. E.g. my /etc/hosts got lost this time :(