How-To: Create a Custom User Template in Snow Leopard

Setting up your OS to your liking can be an art for some. What if you need to set up Snow Leopard to present every user with the same look and settings? By following these steps you can have every user who logs into the machine receive the same look, feel and preferences that you desire. What we’ll be doing is creating a new user, setting it up to look how we want, then copying the settings so every new user will get those preferences.

Setting Everything Up

Login under your admin account and open up Accounts pane in System Preferences.
Click the + to create a new Standard user.
As an example, we’ll use the name testuser.
Log off and log back in as testuser.
Set everything up the way you want. I customized the Dock, Safari’s home page and the Finder preferences.
When you are done customizing, log off the testuser account.

Copying the Files

Login under your admin account.
Navigate to the /System/Library folder in Finder.
Right-click on the User Template folder and choose Get info.
By default, you cannot browse this folder. Change the permissions so Everyone has Read & Write permissions.
Now we can open up the User Template folder & copy the English.lproj folder to your desktop. This will be our backup copy in case we want to restore it back.
Open up Terminal and navigate to the User Template folder.
cd /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj
Copy the testuser folder over, which will replace the defaults. You may get errors about some files that can’t be replaced. I haven’t seen it cause any issues though.
sudo cp -R ~testuser/* .
sudo cp -R ~testuser/.* .
Change the permissions for the User Template folder back so everyone has No Access again.

Test it Out

Create a new user to verify everything worked. I used the name testuser2.
Log off as admin and log back in as testuser2.
You will now see your customized settings. These will be used for all new users created on the system from this point on.

Conclusion

To put everything back the way it was, log in as admin and copy the English.lproj backup file on your desktop back to the /System/Library/User Template folder.

If you have a lab of Macs but aren’t using Open Directory, this is a nice solution to maintain some control over the OS presentation. This change will only affect new users. It has no effect on existing users, so keep that in mind. If you start getting constant requests for more customizations similar to this, setup a Snow Leopard Server and start using Workgroup Manager. The changes can be much easier to implement but the Server solution has a larger price-tag for that convenience.