macOS-setup

apple

The hackers guide to setting up your Mac

The purpose of this guide is to document how to manage your Mac like a boss. After much trial and error I believe this is the fastest, most efficient method to set up a clean, organized, and up-to-date development environment for a Mac.

The overview is presented here, and the details are maintained in the wiki

Goals

I’m a polygot fullstack developer so I have a fairly complex setup. Our goals here are:

Be able to bootstrap a new system quickly with a repeatable process.
Keep all software updated regularly (and keep track of what is installed).
Have a great set of MacOS defaults.
Have a very productive development environment:
- A great shell environment
  - Aliases
  - Fonts
  - Colors
  - Prompt
  - etc.
- A great editor environment
  - Colors
  - Fonts
  - Packages
  - Keys
  - Snippets
  - etc.

Key repositories

There are three very important repositories that contain all configuration data. I would like to explain the purpose of each.

dotfiles - is not actually what it sounds like. My dotfiles are actually managed by mackup. Mackup is a community-driven tool for backing up and restoring dotfiles and application settings. This repo is called dotfiles because that was it’s origin and now mainly because Strap installs it automatically (and runs /script/setup automatically, which we leverage to install everything Homebrew can’t) along with the “homebrew-brewfile” repo below.
homebrew-brewfile - This repo contains my brewfile. This lists everything that I install via Homebrew. This is automatically processed via Strap. See the wiki for more information.
.macos - This repository contains the settings for the MacOS operating system (and some applications and utilities). The origin comes from Mathias Bynens’ amazing MacOS configuration script.

These three repos contain all of my configuration and the entire process is initiated by running Strap.

What’s Inside

A lot of stuff. Seriously, a lot of stuff. Poke around in the Wiki

Building Blocks

We want to use the best tools out there - e.g. the ones with the most community support and momentum and the best functionality.

Bootstrap Your System
- Strap is a script to bootstrap a minimal MacOS development system. It was developed by Mike McQuaid (who is a Homebrew maintainer) and is used by Github.
Shell: Zsh. Zsh is awesome, really. To use Zsh like a boss we will install .oh-my-zsh. It autoupdates, has great plugins and a very active community behind it. Your ZSH settings will be backed up by Mackup below. Resources:
Terminal: iTerm2 for our terminal program. iTerm2 is free and it rocks. Your settings will be backed up by Mackup. Lately I have also been using Hyper and it’s growing on me.
Resources:
- Iterm2-color-schemes
- Font: Source Code Pro Light
Editor: Visual Studio Code as our code editor. VSCcode replaced Atom as my main editor.
Tool Version Management: n. Manage Node versions:
- n for node (other possibilities: NVM)
Package Management: Homebrew, npm/yarn, pip. Homebrew is a community-driven package installer and an essential tool for every hacker’s toolkit. Homebrew automates the setup, compiling and linking of binaries. It also makes updating and uninstalling binaries a breeze. It will be automatically installed by Strap above. Resources:
- About Homebrew
Dotfiles Management and Backup: Mackup. Backing up and Restoring our .dotfiles (our configuration) with mackup. Mackup is a community-driven tool for backing up and restoring system and application settings. See dotfiles section below.

Bugs

If you run into any issues, please open an issue on this repository and I’d love to get it fixed. Or, pull requests are always appreciated.

Thanks

Way back in the day I forked Zach Holman’s’ excellent dotfiles as my initial starting point. I liked his organization and approach.
Much of the OSX defaults script comes from Mathias Bynens’ amazing dotfiles. Mathias’ OSX defaults script is legendary.
Setting up a new Mac
MacOS Sierra Stuff