This guide covers the basics of setting up a development environment on a new Mac. Whether you are an experienced programmer or not, this guide is intended for everyone to use as a reference for setting up your environment or installing languages/libraries.

This will allow you to install almost any app from the command line. In previous versions, you’d have to install XCode or Command Line Tools before using this, but that step is no longer necessary.

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

The Mac App Store command line interface, or mas-cli, will allow you to install from the App Store.

brew install mas

Sign in

If you haven’t already logged into the App Store, you can do so now.

mas signin email@email.com

Now I’ll create a file called Brewfile in my main directory, which will list all the programs I want on the computer, and install them in a bundle.

Open Terminal, which will be in your home folder by default (/Users/you). Create the file.

touch Brewfile

You can edit the file with TextEdit, or by typing nano Brewfile. If you choose to edit with nano, you can save the file by typing Control + O to save, and Control + X to exit the file.

Here are all the programs I intend to install with a brief description. You can choose to add or subtract any programs you’d like. They’re all free.

1. Cask – an extension to Homebrew that will allow you to install almost any program that exists for a Mac
2. Git – for version control
3. npm – Node Package Manager (yes, we’re installing package managers with package managers. Welcome to current year! Also, npm doesn’t actually stand for that, but shh.
4. Firefox – a front end dev should have all the major browsers installed
5. Google Chrome – web browser
6. MAMP – simplify and sandbox your development environment, if you choose
7. Opera – web browser
8. Spectacle – excellent free app for resizing your windows
9. Sequel Pro – excellent free GUI for MySQL databases 10.VLC Media Player – it plays everything!

Below are the entire contents of my Brewfile, which will install all the above programs with a single command.

tap 'caskroom/cask'

brew 'git'
brew 'npm'
brew 'docker'
brew 'docker-machine'

cask 'chefdk'
cask 'virtualbox'
cask 'vagrant'
cask 'vagrant-manager'
cask 'firefox'
cask 'gimp'
cask 'google-chrome'
cask 'google-hangouts'
cask 'mamp'
cask 'opera'
cask 'spectacle'
cask 'sequel-pro'
cask 'vlc'

Now simply run this command to install the bundle.

brew bundle install

Now that we have all our programs installed and Homebrew all nice and new, we should create a simple script to keep Homebrew up to date. I found this handy command on this Best of Homebrew gist.

First, create a .bash_profile dotfile in your home folder.

touch .bash_profile

We’ll create a bash alias to combine all the commands to keep Homebrew clean and up to date.

alias brewup='brew update; brew upgrade; brew prune; brew cleanup; brew doctor'

Run the following command.

source ~/.bash_profile

Now you can run brewup to update, upgrade, prune, cleanup, and doctor Homebrew. It’s a good idea to do this often, even daily.

brewup

If you use SSH (Secure Shell) to connect to any remote hosts via the command line, you can simplify the process.

You can generate an SSH key to distribute.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "email@email.com"

We’re going to use Node Version Manager (nvm) to install Node.js.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.1/install.sh | bash

Install the latest version.

nvm install node

Restart terminal and run the final command.

nvm use node

Confirm that you are using the latest version.

node -v

You can also test with which node, which will output your Node path and version number.

And for later, here’s how to update:

nvm install node --reinstall-packages-from=node

I have npm installed, and npm is mostly used locally for projects. The only thing I use globally at the moment is Gulp.

Install Gulp globally.

npm install --global gulp-cli

Ruby is required to run Jekyll, a popular static site generator. I’m going to download Ruby Version Manager (rvm) to make sure I have the updated version of Ruby without messing with the built-in system Ruby.

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

You can look for and install the latest version by number, or by running the below command.

rvm install ruby-head

You can run rvm list to see the full list of versions available. To use the latest version, find the number and run this command.

rvm --default use 2.4.0

Confirm that you are using the latest version.

rvm -v

You can also test with which ruby, which will output your Ruby path and version number.

Gem is the Ruby package manager that we’re going to use to install bundler…a package manager. This is necessary to use Jekyll and useful for any other Ruby project.

gem install bundler

A necessity for modern PHP development.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Add it to the executable path.

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Test it on the command line.

composer --version