I used to have a bash script I would run to install everything (libs/tools) you're average web developer would need (node, sublime, google chrome, , python libs etc etc). Unfortunately I lost it after some time. Does anyone use anything similar?
Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
1–10 of 129 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#2I'm using a shell script together with the nix package manager for that. The shell script just ensures that all packages are there (e.g. doing `nix-env -i fpp wget iterm2 jekyll ghc ruby nodejs composer php`). I can pin the version of all packages by configuring `NIX_PATH` to point to a specific `nixpkgs` (the package repository) commit. So that all people have exact the same versions of everything.
Package customizations like a .vimrc is also handled by nix (I recently blogged about how I do this: https://www.mpscholten.de/nixos/2016/05/26/sharing-configura...).
The shell scripts together with the package customizations (e.g. my custom vimrc) are managed by git.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#3I use Thoughtbot's Laptop. https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#4The question asks only about *nix systems, I assume, but it worth mentioning that there is a great tool for Windows too, just in case if someone needs it - https://chocolatey.org/
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#5I'm very interested in a way to containerize (runing them within a vm) these tools that way nothing needs to be installed, and could go easily from machine to machine, without polluting the filesystem.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#6Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#7Use 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 with any of these kinds of tools to brute force complex components if you're in a hurry - ie. ignore the pure / idiomatic way, and use the tool's primitives to dump a shell script on a remote box and then run it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#8https://chocolatey.org/
windows 10 comes with packet manager, so you can just execute the following statements on an fresh windows install (powershell):
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#9I maintain Ansible playbooks for my own systems should the worst happen.
Re: Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?
#10I have my dotfiles for that. Split into different categories (brew, npm, pip) together with all the config files I need. brew and brew cask (with brew-bundle [0] for Brewfile support) take care of getting all libraries and applications onto the system.
For the development itself I'm either shipping my entire config (.vimrc for example) or use systems like spacemacs, sublimious or proton that only need 1 single file to re-install the entire state of the editor.
The install script itself [1] is then symlinking everyhing into place and executes stuff like pip install -r ~/.dotfiles/pip/packages.txt.
It takes a bit of effort to keep everything up to date but I'm never worried of loosing my "machine state". If I go to a new machine all I have to do is clone my dotfiles, execute install.sh and I have everything I need.
On servers I am using saltstack [2], a tool like puppet, ansible and friends, to ensure my machines are in the exact state I want them to be. I'm usually using the serverless version and push my states over SSH to them.
[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle
[1]: https://github.com/dvcrn/dotfiles/blob/master/install.sh