OSX Encrypt Directory

I’ve recently begun volunteering some of my time at church to help run the sound board for worship services. The church has a digital board, which is foreign to me, and there’s been a relatively steep learning curve to get up to speed.

Given that I’m not there where I can learn and practice on the board every week, I need to take pretty good notes. Besides that, I like to keep notes about each service as we do rehearsals, so that I can keep the important aspects to highlight written down for reference.

In addition to the sound board, I have mac in front of me. It’s not my mac, and I’m certainly not the only person that’s using it, so I can’t customize it like I would my personal workstation. It doesn’t have Xcode installed, and therefore definately doesn’t have homebrew, and since it’s not mine, I’m not going to install those things.

I want to keep my notes encrypted when I’m not there. So I looked into what tools I have available to me to do such a task. Note that these might not be default OSX tools, but it’s what was already on the machine when I got there.

In addition, I want some basic things like my vimrc present, but only while I’m the one using the machine. I don’t have my own user on the machine, so I can’t just customize the $HOME dir.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, I just haven’t done this before, and I want to document it, especially since someone might find my personal hidden directory and remove it.

Create the workspace: 🔗

mkdir -p ~/.andrew/notes/config/vim/pack/default/start
touch ~/.andrew/notes/config/vim/vimrc
touch ~/.andrew/toggle

I won’t fill the files/directories right now - just want to show that there’s contents there.

Create the toggle 🔗

toggle.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e

FILE=notes

encrypt() {
    rm -rf "${HOME}/.vim"
    zip -r "${FILE}.zip" $FILE
    openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -in "${FILE}.zip" -out "${FILE}.enc"
    rm -rf $FILE "${FILE}.zip"
}

decrypt() {
    openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d -in "${FILE}.enc" -out "${FILE}.zip"
    unzip "${FILE}.zip"
    rm -rf "${FILE}.enc" "${FILE}.zip"
    ln -s "${PWD}/${FILE}/config/vim $HOME/.vim"
}

if [[ -e $FILE ]]; then
    encrypt
else
    decrypt
fi

Note the set -e!!! I didn’t set this at first, and after screwing up some of the openssl, I deleted all my work, and I didn’t have a backup saved… Don’t be me. Make a backup, and fail fast.