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Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

vanderveer.be

21–30 of 33 posts

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#21

Easier way to get a good development environment and not have to deal with a crippled window manager: http://www.ubuntu.com/ On a more serious note, what is with the fad of running OSX and doing all of your work in a VM? OSX is terrible for anything serious and is enough of a pain in the ass that one must use a VM just to run their web application on their development machine. Why not just use Linux? Why not use Wind…

I don't know, I find the solid kernel and userland combined with homebrew just as good as Ubuntu, and most graphical applications are a lot more stable and consistent than their Linux alternatives. I work on all kinds of things, and the only thing I've ever needed a VM for is testing code written specifically for Windows.

Also, Instruments.app (dtrace frontend) is awesome.

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if your development environment is for iOS apps? How will ubuntu help you out installing xcode? Ubuntu is not the end all of things. The "fad" of running things in a vm is so that you can validate that you've not forgotten something about your setup and deploy process. If you run it locally on your workstation that you've tweaked umpteen million ways you may have forgotten about some tweak you made and boom…

The problem of replicating environments was already a solved issue for me. When I'm setting up an environment for the first time, I make note of all of the commands required to set it up and put them in a shell script. I guess it's nice to not have to tweak them when there's an OS upgrade. The other side of solving this is writing tests to check that, for instance, a particular language extension is loaded. The appli…

That shell script will be no good on Windows, which was your other recommendation to replace OS X.

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#23

Great post. I am currently doing something very similar and documenting the process :) I'd recommend chef librarian over soloist though.

Co-maintainer of pivotal_workstation and soloist here. The as-yet unreleased Soloist 1.0.0, head of master on https://github.com/mkocher/soloist, uses Librarian to yank in dependencies if you have a Cheffile.

Soloist itself is just a tool to simplify generating a runlist and specifying node attributes. In fact, it just reads out of a single YAML file and does what that file says. It even gives you what might be considered role support.

Plus we totally take pull requests!

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#24

Great tips. Thanks. I also use TotalFinder (tabbed finder replacement) as well as Asepsis (prevents .DS_Store files) from binaryage.com. I'm a Java dev, flipping back and forth between IntelliJ and Eclipse. Using Eclipse since the pre-1.0 alpha, I still find it more comfortable. But IntelliJ's rate of improvement has prompted me to use it more. I've become good friends with SSH. We do lots of deploy/ops work at this…

"I'm a Java dev, flipping back and forth between IntelliJ and Eclipse. Using Eclipse since the pre-1.0 alpha, I still find it more comfortable. But IntelliJ's rate of improvement has prompted me to use it more."

I think you get it really backwards... Back in the days IntelliJ was just soooo much more better than Eclipse it wasn't even funny to compare the two. It was just plain sad.

But... As a lot people predicted, Eclipse being Open Source and IBM having put some of its weight behind it, Eclipse started to get quite good.

Nowadays Eclipse as nearly caught up and it's just a matter of time before Open Source, once again, shall win.

It hasn't prevented me from buying IntelliJ at 70% during their doomsday sales.

Anyway the "rate of improvement" you're talking about is definitely on Eclipse's side (and this come from some using IntelliJ since version 3 or 4, don't remember), not on IntelliJ.

IntelliJ is still banking on its slight edge, but as time passes by that edge is eroding more and more...

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#25

Great tips. Thanks. I also use TotalFinder (tabbed finder replacement) as well as Asepsis (prevents .DS_Store files) from binaryage.com. I'm a Java dev, flipping back and forth between IntelliJ and Eclipse. Using Eclipse since the pre-1.0 alpha, I still find it more comfortable. But IntelliJ's rate of improvement has prompted me to use it more. I've become good friends with SSH. We do lots of deploy/ops work at this…

Putting the remote host in the tab title is easy and included:

https://github.com/roderik/pivotal_workstation/blob/master/t...

As for the prompt, also included in the bash-it theme

https://github.com/roderik/bash-it/blob/master/themes/roderi... screenshot: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/16780/35890/82d9d2fa-5290-...

I also use TotalFinder, but it seems this is one where my discipline didn't hold up, i installed it by hand :)

Eclipse should be easy, and IntelliJ is almost the same as phpstorm, the recipe for that is in the repo.

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#26
post #2

I've started doing something similar, except I also use vagrant to ensure that my development OS is the same as production. I also find it easier keeping everything for dev within a VM.

I'm doing this too, and it's funny because one of the things I originally liked about OS X was that the UNIX roots allowed me to run my dev environment locally. Still, Vagrant makes this all pretty easy.

I'm a big fan of Vagrant but all our developers use MacBook Air's with 4GB memory and lots of different projects at the same time it's just a pain to use Vagrant.

We compensated this by using a few staging servers and using Vagrant if there are issues at this level (almost never btw)

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#27

Easier way to get a good development environment and not have to deal with a crippled window manager: http://www.ubuntu.com/ On a more serious note, what is with the fad of running OSX and doing all of your work in a VM? OSX is terrible for anything serious and is enough of a pain in the ass that one must use a VM just to run their web application on their development machine. Why not just use Linux? Why not use Wind…

In addition to benefits that others have pointed out, the ability to do easy snapshots/rollbacks/clones of your VM is pretty handy for any number of purposes.

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#29

Terrific concept. What tools (if any) exist to do this kind of thing on Linux VM? Do they work equally well for non Ruby environments (I'm thinking specifically Python/Django)? I've spent the last week mucking around with VMware/bitnami to try to get a nice clean Python/Django/Pycharm VM for myself (with a template Django project that gracefully does both development and deployment). I'm almost done but what a long h…

In theory this should be super easy on most Linux systems because of the software repos.

On Debian based systems, on your existing development machine, you can do:

    dpkg --get-selections > installed_stuff.txt
Then copy the file "installed_stuff.txt" to the new machine/VM and do:

    dpkg --set-selections 
It becomes a little more difficult when there are dependencies that aren't in the package system.

Another thing I've found useful is to have a git repo with my config files. Then on a new machine I can clone the repo and have access to all of them. I've been meaning to write a script that copies everything to the right location, but haven't got around to it yet.

Re: Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

#30

Terrific concept. What tools (if any) exist to do this kind of thing on Linux VM? Do they work equally well for non Ruby environments (I'm thinking specifically Python/Django)? I've spent the last week mucking around with VMware/bitnami to try to get a nice clean Python/Django/Pycharm VM for myself (with a template Django project that gracefully does both development and deployment). I'm almost done but what a long h…

In theory this should be super easy on most Linux systems because of the software repos. On Debian based systems, on your existing development machine, you can do: dpkg --get-selections > installed_stuff.txt Then copy the file "installed_stuff.txt" to the new machine/VM and do: dpkg --set-selections It becomes a little more difficult when there are dependencies that aren't in the package system. Another thing I've fo…

Check out http://dotfiles.github.com Most scripts have these bootstrap files, my dotfiles and more are based on this repo https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles with a very good setup script.
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