Setting up my development environment

Today is the first day of the pre-course at Makers Academy. During the previous weeks I have been setting up my laptop in order to start learning and getting familiar with the command line, Git, GitHub and Ruby.

To prepare my development environment on my MacBook I followed these steps:

Xcode

We’ll install Xcode from the App Store. We need this because it includes git and other useful development tools.

Homebrew

We’ll install Homebrew following the instruction on their page. It will help us install other tools we’ll need below.

Editor

As our code editor we’ll install either Atom or Visual Studio Code using Homebrew (we use brew cask because it’s a GUI app):

$ brew cask install atom # install atom...
$ brew cask install visual-studio-code # ... or visual studio code

Node

To manage our Node versions, we’ll install nvm using Homebrew (we use just brew because it’s a CLI app):

$ brew install nvm # install nvm
$ nvm install 6.3.1 # install node version 6.3.1
$ nvm alias default 6.3.1 # set 6.3.1 as the default version

And add the following lines to our .bashrc file so that nvm is initialised properly every time we open a terminal:

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
source "$(brew --prefix nvm)/nvm.sh"

We check that everything is working:

$ node --version # check node version
v6.3.1
$ npm --version # check npm version
3.10.3

Ruby

To manage our Ruby versions, we’ll install rbenv and ruby-build using Homebrew (we use just brew because it’s a CLI app):

$ brew install rbenv ruby-build # install rbenv
$ rbenv install 2.3.1 # install ruby version 2.3.1
$ rbenv global 2.3.1 # set 2.3.1 as the default version

And add the following lines to our .bashrc file so that rbenv is initialised properly every time we open a terminal:

export RBENV_DIR="$HOME/.rbenv"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"

We check that everything is working:

$ ruby --version # check ruby version
v2.3.1

Git

We’ll create a .gitconfig file in our home folder:

$ touch ~/.gitconfig

We can add our name and email address to the file so that this information is added to all of our Git commits:

[user]
  name = Blanca Mendizabal Perello
  email = blanca.mendizabal.perello@gmail.com

Optionally, we can configure Git to use our editor of choice (instead of the default, which is vi) by adding these two lines to our .gitconfig file:

[core]
  editor = atom --wait