Setting up my Development Environment

Setting up your development environment can be a pain. On my first attempt I spent most of the day searching google and stackoverflow trying to solve installation issues. I even tried running other people’s install scripts and my mac ended up like frankinstein with crazy customisations I didn’t need. This guide is intended to get a new OSX instance up and running for development using Ruby on Rails and Node JS. You won’t need everything I have installed just pick and choose what you need.

##Install Chrome I love using google chrome, and its the first thing I download and install on a new install of mac osx.

Download

##Install iTerm2 iTerm2 is much better than using the standard OSX terminal.

Download

now to add our /usr/local/bin path to our PATH environment.

$ export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

##Install XCode Command Line Tools

$ xcode-select --install

##Homebrew

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

##RVM Download and install the latest stable release of RVM

$ \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Then add the rvm binaries folder to my PATH environment settings

$ source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

##Upgrade Ruby By default, OSX Mavericks installs ruby version 2.0. To upgrade to the latest ruby version 2.1.1 do the following:

$ rvm get latest
$ rvm install 2.1

now to check what version of ruby our mac is running.

$ ruby -v
ruby 2.1.1p76 (2014-02-24 revision 45161) [x86_64-darwin12.0]

if it still says its on ruby 2.0 just execute the following command in your terminal.

$ rvm use 2.1
Using /Users/yoshi/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1

##Install the Heroku toolbelt Heroku is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) for web applications. It allows for easy deployment of webapps to their cloud based servers and its free for development instances.

Download

$ heroku login

We will also need to create a ssh key and add it to our heroku account.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
$ heroku keys:add

Now to test if its all working with heroku.

$ mkdir ~/myapp
$ cd ~/myapp
$ heroku create
Creating sheltered-dawn-1053... done, stack is cedar
http://sheltered-dawn-1053.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:sheltered-dawn-1053.git

##Git and Github Installing the heroku toolbelt will also install git. To update to the latest version of git do the following:

$ brew install git
$ git --version
git version 1.9.2

Setup your global variables

$ git config --global user.name "John Doe"
$ git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com
$ git config --global push.default simple

Now to link it up to our github account and to test if its all working. First create a myapp repo in github.

$ git init
$ touch README.md
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "first commit"
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/yoshdog/myapp.git
$ git push -u origin master

check back on your github repo and the README file should appear.

##Install Postgres

$ brew install postgresql

Check if its installed correctly and is the latest version.

$ postgres --version
postgres (PostgreSQL) 9.3.4

##Install Ruby Gems

To install Rails, just install it via ruby’s package management system.

$ gem install rails
$ rails -v
Rails 4.1.0

Now to install RSPEC.

$ gem install rspec
$ rspec -v
2.14.8

##Install node.js Although node.js is another language and framework I like to install so I can run Javascript files in terminal and using the npm packaging module I can install front end frameworks pretty easily. Download

Check if its install correctly.

$ node --version
v0.10.28

Install Yeoman / Grunt / Bower

$ npm install -g yo

##Install Alfred To be honest, OSX’s spotlight search sucks. I love using alfred instead as you can customise it.

Install it from: here To unlock all the customised features and to build workflows you will need to purchase it.

##Dash Doc I love having dashdoc as it lets me have an offline version of documentation of the popular programming languages and frameworks.

Download it from: here

The great thing also is I can customise sublime text and alfred to lookup certain documentation.

##Sublime Text I am currently using sublime text as my text editor. Although I still use vim, I still like using sublime as its fast and customisable.

Download it: here

After this you will need to create some shortcuts for sublime and subl for your terminal.

$ ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/sublime
$ ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl