Dan Everton Notes on tech and other topics

Notes To Self - Reinstall After Rebuild on OS X

2 min read homebrew notes osx

For various reasons I’ve had to reinstall from scratch all the software on my work MacBook a lot lately. These are some notes on how I get back to usable state from a clean OS X install. I can’t imagine this is super useful to other people, so consider this skippable content.

Set up Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager that makes it significantly easier to get software installed on OS X in a simple way. With some extensions Homebrew Cask, it can also managed GUI installers. This will also install the command line complier tools from XCode.

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
xcode-select --install
brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask

Get a Nicer Terminal Environment Going

Even OS X Yosemite ships with Bash 3.2 which is a little old for my taste. I also much prefer iTerm 2 to the built-in Terminal application. Once those are installed we can also get our dotfiles going by cloning from Github and using dfm.

brew install bash
brew cask install iterm2
git clone [email protected]:deverton/dotfiles.git ~/Documents/dotfiles
cd ~/Documents/dotfiles
git checkout deverton
git submodule init
git submodule update
dfm install

To make the new Bash the default login for our user we need to tell OS X about it.

sudo -c "echo '/usr/local/bin/bash' >> /etc/shells"
sudo -c "dscl . change /users/$USER UserShell /bin/bash /usr/local/bin/bash"

Now start iTerm2 and all my customisations should be back.

Manage Installed Ruby Versions Sanely

In the great RVM vs rbenv fight I’ve come down on the side of rbenv. Homebrew makes it simple to install.

brew install rbenv ruby-build
rbenv install 2.2.0

Which gives us a Ruby 2.2.0 installation in a nice contained manner.

And The Rest….

Install various command line tools. Some tools of noteL

  • jq for munging JSON on the command line.
  • The The Silver Searcher is a much faster grep with sensible defaults and nice output.
  • vim because of course vim. The keep an eye on Neovim.
  • pv to make those long running pipe command lines friendly.
brew install
    awscli \
    jq \
    maven \
    pv \
    the_silver_searcher \
    vim

Install various GUI apps.

brew cask install
    boot2docker \
    chrome \
    firefox \
    hipchat \
    java \
    keepassx \
    sourcetree \
    vagrant \
    virtualbox