Script configuration of Thunderbird profile on multiple OS X machines

Question

How can I script the installation of Thunderbird profiles and configuration of per-user account settings onto a number of network machines running OS X?

Answer 1

UPDATED:

Thunderbird's account settings are part of the profile. Therefore, to create a new profile for each user, you need to copy over the Profile's folder and the profiles.ini file which thunderbird checks to know which profile to load. Finally, you need to edit a few files in the Profile folder so that they point to the correct paths in the new machine.

For example, lets say that your master (local) user is called LOCALUSER and use a profile called knw54wii.default. In the file /Users/LOCALUSER/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/knw54wii.default/prefs.js, there will be lines specifying directory paths like:

(9A=/Users/LOCALUSER/.thunderbird/knw54wii.default/Mail/Local Folders)

You will need to change all instances of /Users/LOCALUSER/ to /Users/REMOTEUSER/ where REMOTEUSER is the username for each remote machine. You can automate all this using BASH, ssh/scp and sed:

#!/bin/sh 
while read name ip ;
do
    scp -r "~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/knw54wii.default/" $name@$ip:"/Users/$user/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/"; 
    scp -r "~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/profile.ini" $name@$ip:"/Users/$user/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/"; 
    ssh  $name@$ip sed -i s/LOCALUSER/"$name"/g /Users/$user/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/knw54wii.default
done < $1

Make sure to change LOCALUSER to whatever username you have on your local, master machine. Also change knw54wii.default to the appropriate profile name. Then, save this script as copy_thunderbird.sh, and run it on a list of users and their IP addresses:

bash copy_thunderbird.sh IPlist.txt

Where IPlist.txt contains one local user and their ip per line, eg:

bob 192.168.1.10
dick 192.168.1.11
harry 192.168.1.12

The script line above, runs two scp commands, one copying the profile folder and the second copying profile.ini. The third command runs sed to change all instances of LOCALUSER to whatever is currently in the $name variable, ie the remote user's name.

To avoid having to repeatedly enter the ssh password, you can try setting up passwordless ssh.

I do not currently have access to an OSX machine so I am extrapolating all this from my Linux set up. Make sure to test it first. Even if it does not work perfectly it should at least help you along.