Getting your tools right is an important step in becoming a developer. This guide will walk you through every step you need to take.
There are multiple options that can be used when setting up your computer. This guide is opinionated about those options. Our guidelines are:
- When possible, use what you already have instead of installing something new.
- Use the most common development tool unless it is deficient.
- Less setup is better.
Before anything else, update your operating system. To do that, go to the Apple Menu () > About This Mac > Software Update.
Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy and set the following:
- Under General, set require a password after sleep or screen saver begins to immediately.
- Click Advanced… and select Require an administrator password to access system-wide preferences.
- Under Firewall, click Turn Firewall On.
- Under FileVault, enable FileVault. This will encrypt your disk. Without it, anyone with a bootable USB drive can get full access to your computer.
iTerm2 is an open source replacement for Apple's Terminal. It's highly customizable and comes with a lot of useful features.
You can get the app from the iTerm2 downloads page. Once downloaded, drag and drop the iTerm application file into your Applications folder.
See this iTerm2 setup guide for optional suggested settings.
NOTE: Run iTerm now to open a terminal window. For the rest of this guide, when we ask you to run something in the terminal or "on the command line", we will be referring to typing the command into an iTerm terminal window and pressing Enter. We will often just say "run" with a command beneath, like this:
$ cd ~
When you see these commands, do not paste the $. This dollar sign is there to indicate the terminal prompt.
XCode is a set of developer tools from Apple that have to be installed. To install them, go to the App Store and install XCode. This is a big package and will take quite a while.
Once XCode is installed, run the following in your terminal:
$ sudo xcodebuild -license
$ xcode-select --install
The first line will prompt you to read the license and agree to it. It will ask for your password. The second line will prompt you to install the command line tools. Follow the instructions and you'll have Xcode and Xcode command line tools both installed.
Homebrew calls itself The missing package manager for macOS and is an essential tool for any developer.
To install Homebrew paste the following command in your terminal, hit Enter, and follow the steps on the screen:
$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
One thing we need to do is tell the system to use programs installed by Homebrew (in /usr/local/bin) rather than the OS default if it exists. We do this by adding /usr/local/bin to your $PATH environment variable:
$ echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
To be able to use brew you need to start a new terminal session. Do this by opening a new terminal tab with Cmd+T (you should also close the old one), then run the following command to make sure everything is working:
$ brew doctor
To install a package (or formula in Homebrew vocabulary) simply run:
brew install <formula>
To update Homebrew's directory of formulae, run:
brew update
To see if any of your packages need to be updated:
brew outdated
To update a package:
brew upgrade <formula>
To see what you have installed (with their version numbers):
brew list --versions
If you do not yet have a GitHub account, go there and register for one.
Git is the version control tool we will use in class to manage your code. To install it, run:
$ brew install git
When done, to test that it installed correctly, you can run:
$ git --version
And $ which git should output /usr/local/bin/git.
Next, we'll define your Git user (this should be the same name and email you use for GitHub):
$ git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"
$ git config --global user.email "your_email@youremail.com"This data will get added to your .gitconfig file.
To push code to your GitHub repositories, we're going to use the recommended HTTPS method. So you don't have to type your username and password everytime, enable Git password caching as described here:
$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
On a Mac, it is important to remember to add .DS_Store (a hidden macOS system file that's put in folders) to your .gitignore files.
Configure your Git to globally exclude those files:
# specify a global exclusion list
$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
# adding .DS_Store and other Mac-specific files to that list
$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gitignore/master/Global/macOS.gitignore -o ~/.gitignoreWe want to add two things to your command line: the ability to autocomplete Git commands and information about Git to your prompt. To do this, run:
$ brew install bash-completion bash-git-prompt
$ echo '[[ -f "$(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion" ]] && source "$(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion"' >> ~/.bash_profile
$ echo '[[ -f "$(brew --prefix)/opt/bash-git-prompt/share/gitprompt.sh" ]] && source "$(brew --prefix)/opt/bash-git-prompt/share/gitprompt.sh"' >> ~/.bash_profile
Exit the terminal and start a new window. Your command line should now look like this:
✔ ~
13:09 $
Python has two different major versions, Python 2 and Python 3. We will use Python 3 throughout this course. While Python 3 is widely used, Python 2 is the default still on OS X, so we will have to install Python 3, as well as a tool we will use throughout the course to manage Python projects, pipenv. To install these, run:
$ brew install python3 pipenv
Once this is done, you should be able to run the following commands and get output like this:
$ python3 --version
Python 3.7.0
$ pipenv --version
pipenv, version 2018.10.13
Python has its own way of installing Python-specific packages, called "pip". To use the Python 3 version of pip, we have to run pip3. Run the following to install a few more tools we'll need:
$ pip3 install flake8 autopep8 pep8-naming isort
Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is the program we will primarily use to edit code. To install it, run:
brew cask install visual-studio-code
Google Chrome is the browser we will use in class. To install it, run:
brew cask install google-chrome