Mac OS X

Rerunning the Setup Assistant

Often times you will want the Mac OS X Setup Assistant to run post the initial installation or imaging. Perhaps you bake an image into machines at a retail store, installing a number of software packages, or maybe you just want a shot at entering your credit card information because you used Command-Q to quit the Setup Assistant when you first unboxed your boxen. Either way, it’s a fairly straight forward task. Simply delete the .AppleSetupDone, stored in the /var/db directory.  Note that this file is hidden and owned by root, so use the following command to remove it:

sudo rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

It’s also worth noting that when doing a deployment, you can create the .AppleSetupDone file to suppress the Setup Assistant even if it has yet to be run.