Setup Mac OS X for development

After setting up a Mac with Mac OS X Mavericks from scratch, it seems to be a good point to write about the tools I install and use for my daily work as a software developer. I hope, this might help developers switching to Mac OS X as well as people being new to software development to get the basic stuff on their machines.

Basic development tools

In the past I have used iTerm 2, but after some improvements in the last years, I am using Apple’s Terminal app again. It is good enough for me 😉.

Apple comes with the Bash as the default Shell. That might be fine for many users, but I prefer the much more comfortable Zsh, which is already included in Mac OS X Mavericks.

chsh -s /bin/zsh

Its comfort comes from its flexibility, but it requires a lot of configuration before you benefit from it. As a lazy guy I use an open source configuration from the internet instead of doing it myself. It is the famous OH MY ZSHELL!.

curl -L https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh | sh

It is pretty easy to activate the plugins you need or do other customization of OH MY ZSHELL! by modifying the .zshrc file. You can find mine in a Gist.

Apple also provides some basic tools like GCC, Git and Subversion for Mac OS X, but they are not installed by default. In the past it was necessary to install Apple’s XCode IDE to get them on your machine, but nowadays there is a slim solution by just installing the command line tools 👍.

xcode-select --install

The most important reason to install the tools is Homebrew 🍺. Mac OS X has no package manager to install additional tools and Unix libraries from the internet, but the open source community fixes this with Homebrew. It is extremly easy to install.

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

By default tools from Homebrew will be installed to /usr/local and thus overwrite the ones provided by Apple. This includes Git, which comes in a newer version from Homebrew. While this version has colored output when running git log, its Subversion bindings are broken. To fix it, I have an alias in my .zshrc.

alias git-svn="/usr/bin/git svn"

git-svn allows me use Git as the one and only versioning tool, even when a project or company still uses Subversion 😜.

Update: Git Subversion integration has been fixed. So the alias is no longer required.

Ruby and RVM

Mac OS X Mavericks comes with Ruby 2.0.0 build in, but it might be a good idea to install further versions. My preferred solution to this is RVM. Installation is easy and it can automatically install packages from Homebrew, when required by a Ruby version.

curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --autolibs=homebrew

I use RVM only for developing Ruby code, but not for running Homebrew and other Ruby based software. So I set the default Ruby to Apple’s build in version.

rvm --default use system

In Ruby projects I put a .ruby-version file with the version, the project requires. RVM will automatically switch to the version configured in the file, when you enter the project directory in your terminal. It will use Apple’s Ruby again, when leave the project.

Java

Apple no longer provides a Java runtime by default. Running the command java from the terminal will install Java 6 as provided by Apple, but for most developers Java 7 will be a better choice. The easiest way to get Java 7 on your machine is installing Oracle’s 👿 Package. To make it work, it is required to set the JAVA_HOME variable in .zshrc. This will also prevent the installation of Apple’s Java 6.

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home/

Some useful tools like Maven, Gradle, SBT or Leiningen can be installed by Homebrew.

brew install maven
brew install gradle
brew install leiningen
brew install sbt

For most Java developers a JDK and one of these build tools is not enough. They also need an IDE. I prefer IntelliJ IDEA as a Java IDE. Even if you have set JAVA_HOME to Oracle’s 👿 Java 7, IDEA 12 still requires Apple’s Java 6 for some reasons. But that is no problem, since IDEA will prompt you for installation after the first start.

Node

Node.js is not included by Mac OS X Mavericks and there is no package available from Apple, but it can be installed from Homebrew.

brew install node

This will also install NPM for installing JavaScript packages. Most of these packages are project specific and will be declared in a package.json file, but there are two JavaScript tools, I like to install globally 🌏.

npm install -g bower
npm install -g grunt-cli

It is required to bring them on the PATH in .zshrc. Otherwise global NPM packages are not known by your Shell.

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

Emacs

It is important to have a good text editor 📝 as a developer. My favorit one is Emacs and it can be installed via Homebrew.

brew install emacs --cocoa

Emacs is similar to ZSH in being very flexible and thus very powerful and comfortable, but it also needs a lot of configuration. I use Emacs prelude as an existing configuration.

curl -L http://git.io/epre | sh

I have also some tiny customization of Emacs prelude in a Gist.

Ready

That is all. I hope it might be helpful for someone. Choose the tools you need from above and be productive! 🍺💃😊