Yo!, So You Have A New Mac — Let’s Dive Deep & Prepare Our New Dev Rifle

Seriously, You have got your self a new mac book pro — that skinny shinny space grey (13-inch Screen, 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports — with a 7th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640, 16GB RAM 256 Flash Storage). Sweet! take a knee bro, just drop down to yo knees thankful for life today.

No, don’t tel the Winblows guys, they will feel some type of way — make that Tyson face — think you robbed the bank!

Ok, Lets Prepare our Nu Nu Dev Machine — install developer tools & home brew, tweak our terminal, brew install any software in your developer toolbox.

1. Configure Your New Rifle — AK47 & be in Control of it!

We will cover installing Home brew and other useful initial configurations.

Since we want home brew installations to take precedence over stock macOS binaries, we will change our path to home brew preferred /usr/local/bin PATH.

Open the terminal, To open it, either open your Applications folder, then open Utilities and double-click on Terminal, or press Command — spacebar to launch Spotlight and type “Terminal,” then double-click /click it in the search result.

First run this command echo $PATH to check the default PATH environment variable

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

If your running macOS High Sierra — version 10.13.4, macOS sets the PATH environment variable to /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin by default. So we are good to brew., this is what home brew prefers. If your $PATH environment is different from what you see above.., go ahead do the following steps and setup your bash_profile, if your ready to brew, skip this part and install the command line tools.

Let’s setup our bash profile and make those changes. in your terminal, open ~/.bash_profile

vim ~/.bash_profile 

add..

# home brew user installed binaries
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Let’s source the file to immediately effect our changes

source ~/.bash_profile

Now, Let’s install our developer tools.. installing this in the past required you to first install Xcode app 5+ GB, thankfully now you can just install Apple’s command line developer tools separately if you don’t need Xcode. run this command in the terminal

xcode-select --install

Pop up will ask you whether to install Xcode (Get Xcode) or the Command line tools, choose the latter and will take some few mins (6 — 1) if your internet connection is stable and no download restrictions.

Homebrew — The missing package manager for macOS

Homebrew provides an easy way to install packages on a mac, so let’s open up Terminal.app and install it:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Follow the prompts, enter your administrative password when prompted and we should be ready to brew..

Hang on, run this command to ensure that there aren’t any potential problems with your environment

brew doctor

If You see something like this, go on and brew

MacBook-Pro-64:~ sekayasin$ brew doctor
Your system is ready to brew.

Now, update to the latest version of home brew

brew update 

Ok, Now we are ready to brew.. Let’s install some packages using home brew

brew install git

You can as well run brew info git , if you want to know more about the package.

Some useful home brew commands can been seen by running man brew , in the terminal.

Ok, Now your system is ready to brew.., keep brewing.. Next will tweak our Terminal, install power line fonts, iTerm2, Oh My Zsh, Solarized colors, and also pimp our vi editor, All this will be in my part2