Mac OS X Dev Setup

This document describes how I set up my developer environment on a new MacBook or iMac. We will set up Node (JavaScript), Python, and Ruby environments, mainly for JavaScript and Python development. Even if you don't program in all three, it is good to have them as many command-line tools use one of them. As you read and follow these steps, feel free to send me any feedback or comments you may have.

The document assumes you are new to Mac. The steps below were tested on OS X Mountain Lion.

If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to give me a shout on Twitter!

• System update
• System preferences
• Google Chrome
• iTerm2
• Homebrew
• Consolas
• Beautiful terminal
• iTerm2
• ohmyZSH
• Git
• Node.js
• MongoDB
• Redis
• Elasticsearch
• Projects folder
• Apps

System update

First thing you need to do, on any OS actually, is update the system! For that: Apple Icon > Software Update...

System preferences

If this is a new computer, there are a couple tweaks I like to make to the System Preferences. Feel free to follow these, or to ignore them, depending on your personal preferences.

In Apple Icon > System Preferences:

• Trackpad > Tap to click
• Keyboard > Key Repeat > Fast (all the way to the right)
• Keyboard > Delay Until Repeat > Short (all the way to the right)
• Dock > Automatically hide and show the Dock

Google Chrome

Install your favorite browser, mine happens to be Chrome.

Download from www.google.com/chrome. Open the .dmg file once it's done downloading (this will mount the disk image), and drag and drop the Google Chrome app into the Applications folder (on the Mac, most applications are installed this way). When done, you can unmount the disk in Finder (the small "eject" icon next to the disk under Devices).

iTerm2

Since we're going to be spending a lot of time in the command-line, let's install a better terminal than the default one. Download and install iTerm2 (the newest version, even if it says "beta release").

In Finder, drag and drop the iTerm Application file into the Applications folder.

You can now launch iTerm, through the Launchpad for instance.

Let's just quickly change some preferences. In iTerm > Preferences..., under the tab General, uncheck Confirm closing multiple sessions and Confirm "Quit iTerm2 (Cmd+Q)" command under the section Closing, Working Directory select Reuse previous session's directory

In the tab Profiles, create a new one with the "+" icon, and rename it to your first name for example. Then, select Other Actions... > Set as Default. Finally, under the section Window, change the size to something better, like Columns: 125 and Rows: 35.

When done, hit the red "X" in the upper left (saving is automatic in OS X preference panes). Close the window and open a new one to see the size change.

Homebrew

Package managers make it so much easier to install and update applications (for Operating Systems) or libraries (for programming languages). The most popular one for OS X is Homebrew.

Install

An important dependency before Homebrew can work is the Command Line Tools for Xcode. These include compilers that will allow you to build things from source.

Now, Xcode weights something like 2GB, and you don't need it unless you're developing iPhone or Mac apps. Good news is Apple provides a way to install only the Command Line Tools, without Xcode. To do this you need to go to http://developer.apple.com/downloads, and sign in with your Apple ID (the same one you use for iTunes and app purchases). Unfortunately, you're greeted by a rather annoying questionnaire. All questions are required, so feel free to answer at random.

Once you reach the downloads page, search for "command line tools", and download the latest Command Line Tools (OS X Mountain Lion) for Xcode. Open the .dmg file once it's done downloading, and double-click on the .mpkg installer to launch the installation. When it's done, you can unmount the disk in Finder.

Note: If you are running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, then you can install the Xcode Command Line Tools directly from the command line with $ xcode-select --install, and you don't have to go through the download page and the questionnaire.

Finally, we can install Hombrew! In the terminal paste the following line (without the $), hit Enter, and follow the steps on the screen:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

One thing we need to do is tell the system to use programs installed by Hombrew (in /usr/local/bin) rather than the OS default if it exists. We do this by adding /usr/local/bin to your $PATH environment variable:

$ echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Open a new terminal tab with Cmd+T (you should also close the old one), then run the following command to make sure everything works:

$ brew doctor

Usage

To install a package (or Formula in Homebrew vocabulary) simply type:

$ brew install <formula>

To update Homebrew's directory of formulae, run:

$ brew update

Note: I've seen that command fail sometimes because of a bug. If that ever happens, run the following (when you have Git installed):

$ cd /usr/local
$ git fetch origin
$ git reset --hard origin/master

To see if any of your packages need to be updated:

$ brew outdated

To update a package:

$ brew upgrade <formula>

Homebrew keeps older versions of packages installed, in case you want to roll back. That rarely is necessary, so you can do some cleanup to get rid of those old versions:

$ brew cleanup

To see what you have installed (with their version numbers):

$ brew list --versions

Consolas

I really like the Consolas font for coding. Being a Microsoft (!) font, it is not installed by default. Since we're going to be looking at a lot of terminal output and code, let's install it now.

There are two ways we can install it. If you bought Microsoft Office for Mac, install that and Consolas will be installed as well.

If you don't have Office, follow these steps:

$ brew install cabextract
$ cd ~/Downloads
$ mkdir consolas
$ cd consolas
$ curl -O http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/5/a/f5a3df76-d856-4a61-a6bd-722f52a5be26/PowerPointViewer.exe
$ cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe
$ cabextract ppviewer.cab
$ open CONSOLA*.TTF

And click Install Font. Thanks to Alexander Zhuravlev for his post.

Beautiful terminal

Since we spend so much time in the terminal, we should try to make it a more pleasant and colorful place. What follows might seem like a lot of work, but trust me, it'll make the development experience so much better.

Let's go ahead and start by changing the font. In iTerm > Preferences..., under the tab Profiles, section Text, change both fonts to Consolas 13pt.

Now let's add some color. I'm a big fan of the Solarized color scheme. It is supposed to be scientifically optimal for the eyes. I just find it pretty.

Scroll down the page and download the latest version. Unzip the archive. In it you will find the iterm2-colors-solarized folder with a README.md file, but I will just walk you through it here:

• In iTerm2 Preferences, under Profiles and Colors, go to Load Presets... > Import..., find and open the two .itermcolors files we downloaded.
• Go back to Load Presets... and select Solarized Dark to activate it. Voila!

Note: You don't have to do this, but there is one color in the Solarized Dark preset I don't agree with, which is Bright Black. You'll notice it's too close to Black. So I change it to be the same as Bright Yellow, i.e. R 83 G 104 B 112.

Not a lot of colors yet. We need to tweak a little bit our Unix user's profile for that. This is done (on OS X and Linux), in the ~/.bash_profile text file (~ stands for the user's home directory).

We'll come back to the details of that later, but for now, just download the files .bash_profile, .bash_prompt, .aliases attached to this document into your home directory (.bash_profile is the one that gets loaded, I've set it up to call the others):

$ cd ~
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/khriztianmoreno/mac-dev-setup/master/.bash_profile
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/khriztianmoreno/mac-dev-setup/master/.bash_prompt
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/khriztianmoreno/mac-dev-setup/master/.aliases

With that, open a new terminal tab (Cmd+T) and see the change! Try the list commands: ls, ls -lh (aliased to ll), ls -lha (aliased to la).

At this point you can also change your computer's name, which shows up in this terminal prompt. If you want to do so, go to System Preferences > Sharing. For example, I changed mine from "Nicolas's MacBook Air" to just "MacBook Air", so it shows up as MacBook-Air in the terminal.

Now we have a terminal we can work with!

(Thanks to Mathias Bynens for his awesome dotfiles.)

ohmyzsh

Oh-My-Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout...

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Git

What's a developer without Git? To install, simply run:

$ brew install git

When done, to test that it installed fine you can run:

$ git --version

And $ which git should output /usr/local/bin/git.

Let's set up some basic configuration. Download the .gitconfig file to your home directory:

$ cd ~
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/khriztianmoreno/mac-dev-setup/master/.gitconfig

It will add some color to the status, branch, and diff Git commands, as well as a couple aliases. Feel free to take a look at the contents of the file, and add to it to your liking.

Next, we'll define your Git user (should be the same name and email you use for GitHub and Heroku):

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"
$ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

They will get added to your .gitconfig file.

To push code to your GitHub repositories, we're going to use the recommended HTTPS method (versus SSH). So you don't have to type your username and password everytime, let's enable Git password caching as described here:

$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

Note: On a Mac, it is important to remember to add .DS_Store (a hidden OS X system file that's put in folders) to your .gitignore files. You can take a look at this repository's .gitignore file for inspiration.

Node.js

NVM

Node Version Manager - Simple bash script to manage multiple active node.js versions

Installation

Install script

To install or update nvm, you can use the [install script][2] using cURL:

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.8/install.sh | bash

or Wget:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.8/install.sh | bash

_{The script clones the nvm repository to ~/.nvm and adds the source line to your profile (~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc, ~/.profile, or ~/.bashrc).}

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm

You can customize the install source, directory, profile, and version using the NVM_SOURCE, NVM_DIR, PROFILE, and NODE_VERSION variables. Eg: curl ... | NVM_DIR=/usr/local/nvm bash for a global install. Ensure that the NVM_DIR does not contain a trailing slash.

_{NB. The installer can use git, curl, or wget to download nvm, whatever is available.}

Note: On Linux, after running the install script, if you get nvm: command not found or see no feedback from your terminal after you type:

command -v nvm

simply close your current terminal, open a new terminal, and try verifying again.

Note: On OS X, if you get nvm: command not found after running the install script, one of the following might be the reason:-

• your system may not have a [.bash_profile file] where the command is set up. Simply create one with touch ~/.bash_profile and run the install script again
• you might need to restart your terminal instance. Try opening a new tab/window in your terminal and retry.

If the above doesn't fix the problem, open your .bash_profile and add the following line of code:

source ~/.bashrc

• For more information about this issue and possible workarounds, please refer here

Homebrew

Install Node.js with Homebrew:

$ brew update
$ brew install node

The formula also installs the npm package manager. However, as suggested by the Homebrew output, we need to add /usr/local/share/npm/bin to our path so that npm-installed modules with executables will have them picked up.

To do so, add this line to your ~/.path file, before the export PATH line:

PATH=/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH

Open a new terminal for the $PATH changes to take effect.

We also need to tell npm where to find the Xcode Command Line Tools, by running:

$ sudo xcode-select -switch /usr/bin

(If Xcode Command Line Tools were installed by Xcode, try instead:)

$ sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

Node modules are installed locally in the node_modules folder of each project by default, but there are at least two that are worth installing globally. Those are CoffeeScript and Grunt:

$ npm install -g coffee-script
$ npm install -g grunt-cli

Npm usage

To install a package:

$ npm install <package> # Install locally
$ npm install -g <package> # Install globally

To install a package and save it in your project's package.json file:

$ npm install <package> --save

To see what's installed:

$ npm list # Local
$ npm list -g # Global

To find outdated packages (locally or globally):

$ npm outdated [-g]

To upgrade all or a particular package:

$ npm update [<package>]

To uninstall a package:

$ npm uninstall <package>

MongoDB

MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database.

Install

Docker

docker run --name mongo-dev -d -v /data/db -p 27017:27017 mongo

Installing it is very easy through Homebrew:

$ brew update
$ brew install mongo
$ mkdir -p /data/db

Set permissions for the data directory

Ensure that user account running mongod has correct permissions for the directory:

sudo chmod 0755 /data/db
sudo chown $USER /data/db

Usage

In a terminal, start the MongoDB server:

$ mongod

In another terminal, connect to the database with the Mongo shell using:

$ mongo

I'll let you refer to MongoDB's Getting Started guide for more!

Redis

Redis is a blazing fast, in-memory, key-value store, that uses the disk for persistence. It's kind of like a NoSQL database, but there are a lot of cool things that you can do with it that would be hard or inefficient with other database solutions. For example, it's often used as session management or caching by web apps, but it has many other uses.

Install

To install Redis, use Homebrew:

$ brew update
$ brew install redis

Usage

Start a local Redis server using the default configuration settings with:

$ redis-server

For advanced usage, you can tweak the configuration file at /usr/local/etc/redis.conf (I suggest making a backup first), and use those settings with:

$ redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

In another terminal, connect to the server with the Redis command-line interface using:

$ redis-cli

I'll let you refer to Redis' documentation or other tutorials for more information.

Elasticsearch

As it says on the box, Elasticsearch is a "powerful open source, distributed real-time search and analytics engine". It uses an HTTP REST API, making it really easy to work with from any programming language.

You can use elasticsearch for such cool things as real-time search results, autocomplete, recommendations, machine learning, and more.

Install

Elasticsearch runs on Java, so check if you have it installed by running:

java -version

If Java isn't installed yet, a window will appear prompting you to install it. Go ahead and click "Install".

Next, install elasticsearch with:

$ brew install elasticsearch

Note: Elasticsearch also has a plugin program that gets moved to your PATH. I find that too generic of a name, so I rename it to elasticsearch-plugin by running (will need to do that again if you update elasticsearch):

$ mv /usr/local/bin/plugin /usr/local/bin/elasticsearch-plugin

Below I will use elasticsearch-plugin, just replace it with plugin if you haven't followed this step.

As you guessed, you can add plugins to elasticsearch. A popular one is elasticsearch-head, which gives you a web interface to the REST API. Install it with:

$ elasticsearch-plugin --install mobz/elasticsearch-head

Usage

Start a local elasticsearch server with:

$ elasticsearch -f

(The -f option tells it to run in the foreground, so you can stop it with Ctrl+C.)

Test that the server is working correctly by running:

$ curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/'

If you installed the elasticsearch-head plugin, you can visit its interface at http://localhost:9200/_plugin/head/.

Elasticsearch's documentation is more of a reference. To get started, I suggest reading some of the blog posts linked on this StackOverflow answer.

Projects folder

This really depends on how you want to organize your files, but I like to put all my version-controlled projects in ~/Projects. Other documents I may have, or things not yet under version control, I like to put in ~/Dropbox (if you have Dropbox installed), or ~/Documents.

Apps

Here is a quick list of some apps I use, and that you might find useful as well:

• Dropbox: File syncing to the cloud. I put all my documents in Dropbox. It syncs them to all my devices (laptop, mobile, tablet), and serves as a backup as well! (Free for 2GB)
• Google Drive: File syncing to the cloud too! I use Google Docs a lot to collaborate with others (edit a document with multiple people in real-time!), and sometimes upload other non-Google documents (pictures, etc.), so the app comes in handy for that. (Free for 5GB)
• 1Password: Allows you to securely store your login and passwords. Even if you only use a few different passwords (they say you shouldn't!), this is really handy to keep track of all the accounts you sign up for! Also, they have a mobile app so you always have all your passwords with you (syncs with Dropbox). A little pricey though. There are free alternatives. ($50 for Mac app, $18 for iOS app)
• Marked: As a developer, most of the stuff you write ends up being in Markdown. In fact, this README.md file (possibly the most important file of a GitHub repo) is indeed in Markdown, written in Sublime Text, and I use Marked to preview the results everytime I save. ($4)
• Path Finder: I love OSX, it's Unix so great for developers, and all of it just works and looks pretty! Only thing I "miss" from Windows (OMG what did he say?), is a decent file explorer. I think Finder is a pain to use. So I gladly paid for this alternative, but I understand others might find it expensive just to not have to use Finder. ($40)
• Evernote: If I don't write something down, I'll forget it. As a developer, you learn so many new things every day, and technology keeps changing, it would be insane to want to keep it all in your head. So take notes, sync them to the cloud, and have them on all your devices. To be honest, I switched to Simplenote because I only take text notes, and I got tired of Evernote putting extra spaces between paragraphs when I copy & pasted into other applications. Simplenote is so much better for text notes (and it supports Markdown!). (Both are free)
• Moom: Don't waste time resizing and moving your windows. Moom makes this very easy. ($10)