How to setup a pretty good dev environment on the mac

(This was a quick write up for a coworker, but others might find it useful)

This assumes you have XCode. I mean, really now.

First thing to do is install mac homebrew. It’s a package manager of useful open source software. You install it by pasting into the terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/gist/323731)"

then just to make sure it’s working, run:

brew install -v git

Next we want to install the node package manager.

It’s a simple

curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Lastly, I like to setup rvm, for managing multiple ruby installations and keeping my base machine clean of stray gems.

bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

RVM is a little more complicated since you also have to add a little something to your shell file so that the paths are loaded correctly

echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

That’s *about* it. I’m still looking into how to setup the RVM equivalent for python, but it seems that community is still figuring out their tools and a clear solution hasn’t emerged yet.