I tried boxen from github. Like others have mentioned, tools like these have a big learning curve and boxen was pretty high maintenance after setup in my experience.
Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
11–20 of 129 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#12I don't do fresh installs very often, but when I do, it's generally because I want it to be a genuine fresh install. As such, I don't install a tool until I need it. I find that tools I once thought I absolutely needed are not tools or libraries that I use anymore.
I have three exceptions to this: Vim (my editor of choice), dotfiles (which I store in a git repository and put in place using stow, installed via a simple bash script), and Vagrant, so I can do development testing against a VM.
As Docker matures, I may use it in place of Vagrant, but it's not ready to fill the same role quite yet.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#13Question: why are you doing a fresh install? If you install everything through your package manager, you don't need a fresh install to clean things up. My operating system has lived through several different machine upgrades. I just do a `cp -a` to copy the files from one hard drive to another, set up the bootloader and go.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#14Use a configuration management tool (I picked https://saltstack.com/ , mostly because of the docs & community support) but there's lots to choose from - Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and so on. There's a learning curve, and plenty of 'where did my afternoon go?' rabbit holes you can lose yourself in. But the upside is that you can have consistent, repeatable, and rapid builds, with modularity as a bonus. Don't be afraid wit…
I've found with Ansible at least, I was initially tempted to make large complicated roles for things like "application server" or "development desktop" but what ended up working much better was very granular roles such as "nginx server" and "emacs" (often just a single task such as "yum: name=nginx state=installed") that can be combined in playbooks. This makes it easier to avoid duplicating tasks in different roles, or having a lot of complex conditional cases in your roles.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#15I find I end up with a lot of cruft and my tools of choice change over time, so I don't worry about it. A decent package manager makes this approach tolerable.
Homebrew and Homebrew Cask on OS X handle at least 90% of what I want to install.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#16Use a configuration management tool (I picked https://saltstack.com/ , mostly because of the docs & community support) but there's lots to choose from - Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and so on. There's a learning curve, and plenty of 'where did my afternoon go?' rabbit holes you can lose yourself in. But the upside is that you can have consistent, repeatable, and rapid builds, with modularity as a bonus. Don't be afraid wit…
I've found with Ansible at least, I was initially tempted to make large complicated roles for things like "application server" or "development desktop" but what ended up working much better was very granular roles such as "nginx server" and "emacs" (often just a single task such as "yum: name=nginx state=installed") that can be combined in playbooks. This makes it easier to avoid duplicating tasks in different roles,…
This is also the best way to do it in Chef.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#17I've found ansible to be okay at setting up my environment. I'm able to configure everything from my zsh themes, terminal font size, window manager shortcuts, thunderbird logins, and so forth. The playbook takes about 30 minutes to run and after that I have almost everything ready.
Unfortunately I don't have a public GH repo I can point at as I don't want to expose everything I use to the internet. However the principle is the same as provisioning servers with ansible.
The only thing different I do is I use GPG keys to decrypt and untar things like thunderbird profiles rather than using Ansible vault. I restore GPG keys + SHH keys from offline, encrypted USB backups.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#18That's a very good reason to only install apps with a real package installer.
On OSX, this is a no-brainer with brew[1] and brew cask[2]
# On my old mac
$ brew list
$ brew cask list
brew install npm
brew install zsh
brew cask install sublime-text
brew cask install google-chrome
brew cask install intellij-idea
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#19I've been using https://github.com/superlumic/superlumic for setting up my Mac machines because it supports a few more constructs that are common for Macs such as plist file modifications. Since it's Ansible-based you use YAML files to configure everything and it works well with Homebrew at least. I spend enough time working on configuration management professionally and don't want to spend any more time than I must to keep sinking time into my workstation's configuration than I have to, so more complicated DSLs / systems like Puppet, Chef, Salt are out for me despite working with those professionally.
In the future I'd like to try NixOS for managing OS X but it seems rather immature at this point for people that want stuff to Just Work primarily.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#20That's a very good reason to only install apps with a real package installer.
On OSX, this is a no-brainer with brew[1] and brew cask[2]
# On my old mac $ brew list $ brew cask list
=> save what I will need later as
``` brew install npm brew install zsh
brew cask install sublime-text brew cask install google-chrome brew cask install github brew cask install intellij-idea ```