List Server Favorites in OS X 10.11 El Capitan

Posted on 2015-10-31

I'm using Alfred a lot less these days. Many of my workflows have been easier to build in Keyboard Maestro. The remaining few that are left in Alfred are ones that I heavily depend on, one of which is accessing my Server Favorites in OS X.

Up until OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Server Favorites were stored in a plist file called com.apple.sidebarlists.plist. I finally got around to upgrading my computers at home only to realize that my "server" workflow stopped working. After inspecting the plist file, I found that those favorites were gone and were hiding elsewhere. After a bunch of searching, and the help of Houdaspot, I found them in ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteServers.sfl. What is this sfl extension? Still not really sure, but after some poking around, this was the only resource I could find that helped me get started.

I don't necessarily like the CoreFoundation stuff in Python, and since I'm on a OS X JavaScript automation roll right now, I decided to give it a try. Turns out, it's really easy.

items = $.NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObjectWithFile('/Users/username/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteServers.sfl')

items = items.objectForKey('items')
itemsCount = items.count

to_ret = []
while (itemsCount--){
      item = items.objectAtIndex(itemsCount)
    to_ret.push(
        {
            name: item.name, 
            url: item.URL.absoluteString
        }
    )
}

to_ret

This returns a nice object of the name and url for the servers in your favorites.

You can download the workflow here.

Tags: automation javascript objectivec