Rebuilding my development environment - Part 1

Again? Seriosuly?

So, apparently my old SSD decided to go kaput. Fortunately, I had the foresight to e-mail this to me just in case it did. Phew. Hold on to your butts. One thing that I’ve been weighing while my computer has been out of comission, is whether or not I should start with the Bash profile. I don’t think I will and we’ll just go with the generic stuff that everyone can make use of. I’ll share some of my Bash profile settings in another part.

Original Start

As fate would have it, my partition got messed up and I had to reformat my disk and reinstall the OS about two months after it wiped my SSD, re-installed the OS, and set up my dev environment.

I had lamented my not writing about the process a couple months ago, so, now I get a second chance! Though I had a pretty cool “How to get Disqus working with your GitHub-hosted Jekyll blog” post in the works that’s lost to eternity. C’est dommage.

Part 1 is going to cover up to the point where I can push this up to my blog.

Optional Section - Applications I love and always install

  • Spectacle - a wonderful application that allows you to quickly reposition windows around your display(s). I can’t live without this
  • Dash - a great application that will store documentation offline for you (handy when your internet connection is crappy or non-existent)
  • Alfred - as-is, this app is only useful if you make it useful. It can become quite the powerful tool if you get the Powerpack and set up some Workflows
  • Sublime Text - this is my preferred text editor. I just like it. Everyone has their preferences and I’m not dogmatic about this. Use what works best for you!

The Fun Stuff Begins - Homebrew

Alright. I love Homebrew. This is a wonderful package manager and it’s how I manage my installs in Terminal. It’s also the first thing I install.

So, heading to Terminal, I run:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

This will run normal stuff but, if you don’t have it installed already, is going to prompt you for your password to install The Xcode Command Line Tools. Go for it.

The Fun Stuff Continues - Git

What’s next? Why don’t we install Git?

Now that we have Homebrew installed, installing Git is as easy as: brew install git

Once that’s installed, if you run git --version in Terminal, you’ll likely see that you’re still running Apple’s Git.

Run hash -r in Terminal and that will clear some cached executable paths and when you run git --version again you should see the version of git that you installed!

What’s Next? Ruby!

Ruby is what I know right now, so that’s my focus here. Again, not being dogmatic here, but I prefer rbenv instead of RVM . There’s a nice and simple comparision here if you want to take a look. If not, we’ll get to installing rbenv and Ruby.

Inside Terminal, let’s run brew install rbenv

So now that we’ve got rbenv installed, let’s install the latest Ruby.

We can see all the available versions by running rbenv install -l (that’s a little L). As of this post, the latest is 2.5.0.

I’ll run rbenv install 2.5.0 by running rbenv install 2.5.0 .

After that’s done, we’ll run ruby -v and find that we’re still running the Ruby version that comes with OS X.

The way I resolved this was to add eval "$(rbenv init -)" to the my .bash_profile and then restart terminal.

Now, if you run rbenv global 2.5.0 and check ruby -v you should see that the Ruby version it returns is correct.

GitHub

Alright. We’re closer to getting this post up on my blog.

Let’s make sure our computer can play nice with GitHub. We’ll need an SSH key first. GitHub has some great instructions on setting this up here.

If you don’t want to go there, here’s the gist (no GitHub-pun intended):

  1. In Terminal, run this: 
    ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_github_email@emaildomain.com"
  2. It’ll then do some stuff, and you can hit enter when prompted for a location if the default location is fine
  3. Then you’ll be prompted for a passcode and to confirm it, go for it So now you’ve got an SSH key, awesome. So we need to add the key to ssh-agent
  4. Start the agent by running eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
  5. Then take look at Step 2 in Adding your SSH key to the ssh-agent section and see if that’s something that applies to you
  6. Then, you’ll add the key the agent: ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa Now, you can add the key to your Github account and you should be good to go!

You might want to test your SSH connection to GitHub.

Cloning Your Repo (if you’re here because you were in the same situation or similar situation)

Okay, so now it’s time to get that repo back on the local machine. If you’ve got Git working and everything is all set from the GitHub section, this should be pretty easy.

  1. In Terminal, go to the folder where you’d like the GitHub repo cloned to (it’ll create a new folder with the repo in it)
  2. On GitHub, open the repo and click on the Clone or download button and if you see the Clone with SSH title, copy that script section
  3. In Terminal, enter git clone and paste what you copied from the GitHub repo and run it You should be all set! Make sure things copied correctly.

You’ll want to check the remotes git remote -v and make sure it’s got the correct fetch and push options. If it does you’re all set!

In Part 2 I’ll start on my Bash profile. Hope this was helpful!