Setting Up Your Mac
Getting your tools right is an important step in becoming a developer. This guide will walk you through every step you need to take.
There are multiple options that can be used when setting up your computer. This guide is opinionated about those options. Our guidelines are:
- When possible, use what you already have instead of installing something new.
- Use the most common development tool unless it is deficient.
- Less setup is better.
Update your system
Before anything else, update your operating system. To do that, go to the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Software Update.
Security settings
Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy and set the following:
- Under General, set require a password after sleep or screen saver begins to immediately.
- Under General, set disable automatic login.
- Click Advanced… and select Require an administrator password to access system-wide preferences.
- Under Firewall, click Turn Firewall On.
- Under FileVault, enable FileVault. This will encrypt your disk. Without it, anyone with a bootable USB drive can get full access to your computer.
iTerm2
iTerm2 is an open source replacement for Apple’s Terminal. It is highly customizable and comes with a lot of useful features.
You can get the app from the iTerm2 downloads page. Once downloaded, drag and drop the iTerm application file into your Applications folder.
NOTE: Run iTerm now to open a terminal window. For the rest of this guide, when we ask you to run something in the terminal or “on the command line”, we will be referring to typing the command into an iTerm terminal window and pressing Enter. We will often just say “run” with a command beneath, like this:
When you see these commands, do not paste the %. This dollar sign is there to indicate the terminal prompt.
XCode
XCode is a set of developer tools from Apple that have to be installed. To install them, go to the App Store and search for XCode, then install it. This is a big package and will take quite a while.
Once XCode is installed, run the following in your terminal:
The first line will prompt you to read the license and agree to it. It will ask for your password. The second line will prompt you to install the command line tools. Follow the instructions and you’ll have Xcode and Xcode command line tools both installed.
Homebrew
Homebrew calls itself “The missing package manager for macOS” and is an essential tool for any developer.
To install Homebrew, paste the following command in your terminal, hit Enter, and follow the steps on the screen:
To be able to use Homebrew you need to start a new terminal session. Do this by opening a new terminal tab with Cmd+T (you should also close the old one), then run the following command to make sure everything is working:
Using Homebrew
To install a package (or formula in Homebrew vocabulary) simply run:
To update Homebrew’s directory of formulae, run:
To see if any of your packages need to be updated:
To upgrade a package:
To see what you have installed (with their version numbers):
Git and GitHub
If you do not yet have a GitHub account, go there and register for one.
Git is the version control tool we will use in class to manage your code. To install it, run:
When done, to test that it installed correctly, you can run and and expect output like this:
And which git should output /usr/local/bin/git.
Next, we’ll define your Git user (this should be the same name and email you use for GitHub):
This data will get added to your .gitconfig file.
To push code to your GitHub repositories, we’re going to use the recommended HTTPS method. So you don’t have to type your username and password every time, enable Git password caching:
Lastly, you want to make sure git uses a text editor that is easier for you to use than the default one. Type the following command to configure git to set nano as the default editor:
Git and .DS_Store files
On a Mac, it is important to remember to add .DS_Store (a hidden macOS system file that’s put in folders) to your .gitignore files.
Configure your Git to globally exclude those files:
Git and the command line
We want to add two things to your command line: the ability to autocomplete Git commands and information about Git to your prompt. To do this, run:
Exit the terminal and start a new window. Your command line should now look like this:
Node.js
When we work with JavaScript, we will often need to use tools written with Node.js. To install Node, run:
Once this is done, you should be able to run the following commands and get output like this:
The exact versions may be different; ensure Node is v13 and above and npm is v6 and above.
Python
Python has two different major versions, Python 2 and Python 3. We will use Python 3 throughout this course. While Python 3 is widely used, Python 2 is the default still on OS X, so we will have to install Python 3, as well as a tool we will use throughout the course to manage Python projects, pipenv. To install these, run:
Once this is done, you should be able to run the following commands and get output like this:
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is the program we will primarily use to edit code. To install it, run:
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is the browser we will use in class. To install it, run: