Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8 | Hacker News Reader

Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

vanderveer.be

89 pointsroderikvdv31 comments

Vaporware at the moment, but keep an eye out for Github's https://github.com/boxen which purports to do similar with Puppet. Demo'd here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlKXRdSAZhY While I'm linking up stuff, another take on masterless Puppet is https://github.com/unixorn/miyamoto

So many of these systems are still too big and complicated. I consider myself an amateur, and therefore I bootstrap with manually getting Dropbox, 1Password, and then update babushka links to do the rest from the canonical sources via github.

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 hard slog it's been.

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 < installed_stuff.txt

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.

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.

Thanks for that - looks like a huge time saver! Unfortunately, it won't fully automate setup. Things like entering passwords for a service you want to set up, tinkering with desktop, firefox or other app settings, etc.

But still - this gets you a big head start.

On linux it is even more easy, since most of the packages are in apt etc. Several recipes have a switch for use on our own servers and vm's: https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation/blob/master/r...

And there is nothing in the result that has anything to do with ruby, just chef and the recipes are in ruby. We use it for setting up our dev environments and servers for PHP websites. Although we use Capistrano for the actual site deployment and not Chef.

roderikvdv's answer was helpful. I also found a long post discussing Django VMs specifically using vagrant:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2011/06/django-advice/

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

I'll admit that I don't see what the advantage of soloist is. What I would probably do is build the runlist via include_recipe statements in pivotal_workstation::default. Then I would create a Berkfile (http://berkshelf.com/) for it, use 'berks install --path' to bundle pivotal_workstation and all its dependencies, and tar that up and upload it somewhere.

The bootstrap then becomes something like

  gem install chef
  echo {"run_list": "recipe[pivotal_workstation]"} > node.json
  chef-solo -j node.json -r http://example.com/pivotal_workstation.tar.gz

The JSON could of course be customized if you needed to set any attributes.

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!

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 gig. I'd love to figure out how to put the remote host's hostname into the tab/title/prompt. I haven't tried zsh yet, not excited about putting zsh on all the remotes (which are a mix of Windows and Linux).

Our databases are Oracle, SQL Server, some legacy mainframe stuff. I use Squirrel SQL. I don't like it much. I haven't found any generic SQL clients as clean and smooth as MySQL's Sequel Pro client.

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.

"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...

>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.

I beg to differ. Eclipse always had a better model of the project and workflow for me. Never could tolerate IntelliJ.

Now, IntelliJ indeed had _more_features_, at least back in the day, compared to Eclipse. But I always found the implementation cluttered and confusing.

Babushka is also great for this kind of thing: http://babushka.me/

Absolutely, similar-looking ruby, too. I was disheartened by the wheel reinvention, but to each his own.

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)

Anything similar for windows?

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 Windows and run a VM in that? At least you'll get the benefit of being able to run more software.

I'm finding it very difficult to understand the justification for such setups and, from personal experience, I find that it's better to avoid shops which operate in such a way altogether.

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 your deploy doesn't work. Fully automating a vm build and setup for local use helps work those kinks out. I'm not a web guy but do the same thing for my ec2 setups.

Also some of use prefer not to use Linux or Windows as our workstation. At work now I am typing this on an Arch linux box, but prefer osx for regular use primarily because of the less bs situation. In addition using windows for the base os means things like having to deal with stuff like cygwin/etc.... and their stupid peculiarities and quirks.

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 application should be throwing a fit if something is missing in the environment.

No arguments there. All this is is just chef recipes to do basically that.

This blog post is a good start but if you have an osx environment you can setup netboot and have a truly automatic install+setup with chef.

I'm a bigger fan of using chef/puppet/whatever over personal shell scripts as then you can test your automation out in a vm. I just build osx vm's and validate my osx automation with that.

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

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.

Not everyone has a say in the environment they use at work, and some people prefer using OSX for certain things. OSX has some decent tools for actually doing the coding in, for example.

Regarding your point about just using Linux. Even if I did run Linux as my desktop machine, I'd still use VMs and Vagrant because it allows me to have an (almost) identical setup to production. It's also much easier to spin up virtual machines running different version of software using this method. Just change one line of config, wait two minutes to spin up and you're good to go. You also don't have all kinds of crap from other projects polluting your environment too.

He's not running his dev environment in a VM. Just automating the setup of an OS X box for development.

It's worth noting that most of these recipes can be easily modified for use on Ubuntu.

That's not true. The author is setting up his development environment on the host machine (OSX)

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.

>On a more serious note, what is with the fad of running OSX and doing all of your work in a VM?

Even if you use Linux you are better of doing all your work in a VM. Reproducibility, sharing, snapshots, isolation, multiple VM for different target environments, etc.

>OSX is terrible for anything serious

Citation needed. What exactly does "serious" mean to you? Several multi-billion companies have their developers working on OS X machines.

And If I want to do something with something like Premiere, Photoshop et co (it is 2012 after all, multimedia is not an afterthought), I'm dead in the water in Linux. Not at all good for serious work.

>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?*

If your needs are simple enough that you are OK with running a single web server with a single set of libs and frameworks, by all means use Linux. It's not like todays "development machines" just need a single Apache and MySQL.

For anything more serious, use a VM, either in Linux or OSX or whatever.

I might need to run 5-6 different DBs, or versions of a DB/Server/Caching/Proxies/etc depending on the project I'm working on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com