Setting up OSX for Development
There are a number of software packages you should get if you want to do certain types of development. I always have a hard time installing things correctly, so I'll go through the steps I used.
Folder setup
Ignore this if you know how you like to organize things.
Before you start downloading things and creating projects, it's a good idea to figure out where new things will all go. I personally put code and project information in ~/Documents/code, applications in ~/Applications, and SDKs in /Developer/SDKs.
Organization is all preference, but it'll make your life easier to pick specific spots for things and always put those types of things in those specific spots. Software installed by package managers usually install to the right place, so you don't have to worry about it.
TextWrangler
TextWrangler by Bare Bones is a fantastic text editor with few features beyond syntax highlighting. We'll use it to make files that TextEdit would mess up with formatting.
You can get it from the App Store or on the Bare Bones site. Once you have dragged it into Applications, open it, and check the 'Install command line tools' option, continue.
Profile file
Create a file in /Users/your-user-name, aka ~, called ".profile" where you'll save environment variables for programs and update the path variable.
Note: to check if the file is there, list the files with hidden files shown:
$ ls -a ~
and you should see '.profile' in the list of files. To open .profile in TextWrangler, use:
$ edit ~/.profile
System-wide $PATH
The $PATH environment variable is a list of colon-separated paths where the shell looks for to find program names. The default order for all users on the machine is in /etc/paths. Open it up, and change the order to be compatible with package managers:
$ edit /etc/paths
And in /etc/paths (newline at the end is important) (order is also important):
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
To add more paths, make a /etc/paths.d/ folder and put more path files there. Again, this is system-wide. To add paths just for a specific user, you can append to the $PATH variable in "~/.profile" like so:
# add /new/path/to/add to path
export PATH=/new/path/to/add:$PATH
Git
Git is the premiere version control system in my eyes, and it's very beneficial to upload your code to GitHub as well. More to the point of this article, it's used to update Homebrew and many other necessities.
Go to the git downloads page and use the installer.
Xcode
You'll need the command line tools for Xcode as well. It comes up again and again as a dependency. If you have OSX 10.7 (Lion) or up, go to the Apple Downloads for Developers site and download the command line tools for your OS version.
If you have Snow Leopard, you can still get Xcode 4.2, but you need a paid developer account with Apple (costs $99) or you can torrent it. If you do torrent it, you'll have to set your system date in System Settings to before January 2011 or it won't install. Also, Xcode 3.6.2 is free and should work for your installing needs.
From what I've read online, you should include the optional UNIX Command Tools, because it's a pain to go back and update later. It's used for C development, and is under 400 Mb.
Homebrew
Homebrew is an incredibly easy to use and transparent package manager for OSX. "Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t."
To install it, paste this command into Terminal:
$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
You'll see after the install that you need Xcode, so I hope you installed it. If not, install Xcode and come back. Run the following command to get Homebrew ready to use.
$ brew doctor
Node.js and Node Package Manager
Regardless if you use node.js or not, more and more software is relying on the server-side V8 JavaScript implementation and npm, or Node Package Manager. I'll give two ways to install them, the first with Homebrew:
$ brew install node
Unfortunately npm does not come with the homebrew installation anymore, so you'll have to get npm independently.
$ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
Or you can go to the node.js website and choose the installer for your platform. If you install it this way, you need to claim ownership of the folder it installs to, or Homebrew may have issues writing header files. So run the following command:
$ sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local/include
Either way once you have node and npm installed, you need to follow up with adding paths to your .profile file. These are basically environment variables that are set at each login.
$ edit ~/.profile
Add the following lines and save .profile
export NODE_PATH=/usr/local/lib/node
export PATH=/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH
Afterwards, close and reopen all command prompts.
Eclipse
If you don't develop in Java, C/C++ or Android, skip this section.
I always download the classic eclipse, and then install software as needed. I'll walk through how to install C/C++ developing tools and the Android sdk as well. But first, go to the eclipse foundation downloads page and get the latest Eclipse Classic. If you have a moderately recent computer, you are 64-bit architecture.
Open eclipse, and choose a workspace. A workspace is a folder where projects live. Usually you want it to be a logical division among projects, like you could have one for school, and one for side projects. You can point it to an existing folder, or have it create a new folder at the given path. The default Documents/workspace is fine as well.
You now have Java taken care of! Next lets get C and C++ working as well. In Eclipse go to
Enter the url in work with this url bar, and choose any name, I put mine as "CDT". Then you should get unchecked boxes for "CDT Main Features" and "CDT Optional Features". I only selected main features. Follow instructions to install and let it restart eclipse.
Python
Mac computers come with python, but I wanted the lastest version. So install python's dependencies and then python with Homebrew. Note that if you aren't the owner of /usr/local be sure to claim ownership.
$ sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local
Then install python and its dependencies with Homebrew
$ brew install readline sqlite gdbm
$ brew install python --universal --framework
It'll take a while. Then we need to edit the .profile again to add the new python location to the PATH variable so the Homebrew version of python is used instead of the system version.
# ~/.profile
PATH=/usr/local/share/python:$PATH
Now you should be have the latest stable release of python. Also, most python development relies on the Python Package Index, so install that too:
$ easy_install pip
Ruby
Mac computers also come with ruby, but not the latest version. Use Hombrew to install it:
$ brew install ruby
It takes a while. Then update your path in the profile file. Check which ruby version Homebrew installed, I got "1.9.3-p194". Then add it to your path:
# ~/.profile
PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/1.9.3-p194/bin:$PATH
Rails
I don't use the built-in documentation ever, so to save gem installation time I don't install them. To set permanent flags to the bundle commands, make a file ~/.gemrc and add these lines:
install: --no-rdoc --no-ri
update: --no-rdoc --no-ri
Then install rails:
$ gem install rails
MAMP
MAMP is an acronym standing for Mac Apache MySQL PHP. On Windows it is WAMP and on Linux (the most popular) it is LAMP. Basically it's a typical application stack for php development. Go to the MAMP site and download the one-click installer.
Unarchiver
This is not really for development, but is very useful. Go to the Unarchiver site and download it for free. It opens most archive types, like Zip, RAR, 7-zip, Tar, Gzip and Bzip2.