“Environment Setup” by John Barnette

Note: I’m rereading this in the first quarter of 2011 and it’s pretty obsolete. I’ll update it at some point.

I’ve had scattered notes on setting up a new development computer from scratch in Backpack for years now. Hopefully collecting them here will make it more likely that they’ll stay up-to-date. This is my environment, probably not what I’d suggest for you.

I don’t necessarily install all of these all the time (MySQL), but I’d still rather have all the instructions in one place.

These notes assume Mac OS X Leopard, with the developer tools installed.

Fundamental Stuff

1Password. It knows all.
Dropbox. Sync folders transparently.
Emacs. I’m building Emacs 23 via MacPorts.
Inconsolata. My favorite programming font.
LaunchBar. Useless without it.
MacPorts. I use this to manage as much dev stuff as I can.
Things. What am I supposed to be doing right now?

Important Stuff

Adium. I like talking on the digital internets.
FireFox. I use Safari for daily browsing, but FF for lots of dev.
Growl. I turn off most notifications, but it’s still good to have.
Mail Act-On. Effortless filing in Mail.app.
Mail Unread Menu. Since I hide the dock and mute everything.
Parallels. Only for testing stuff on Windows.
Shimo. VPNs are dumb, but Shimo is pretty.
Transmit. FTP, SFTP, S3.
Tweetie. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!
Xmarks. Cross-browser, cross-machine bookmark syncing.

Nice Stuff

FuzzyClock. Normal clocks are boring.
GitNub. Good for quick repo history scans.
Skitch. Screenshots + sharing.

Profile, Emacs Configuration, etc.

I keep most of my dotfiles in a Git repository and symlink them. I do the same thing with Dropbox for 1Password and Things.

RubyGems

$ sudo gem update --system

Git

$ sudo port install git-core +svn +doc
$ git config --global user.name John Barnette
$ git config --global user.email jbarnette@gmail.com

MySQL

$ sudo port install mysql5-server
$ sudo mysql_install_db5 --user=mysql
$ sudo port load mysql5-server

Add /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin to your path, and this should work:

$ mysql -uroot

MySQL Ruby Bindings

sudo gem install mysql --                                    \
  --with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5             \
  --with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5                     \
  --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysql_config