Notes for Setting Up A New Mac

Here’s a few notes for future reference for setting up a new mac laptop.

I am setting up a new MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports), 16GB RAM.

In terms of getting our codebase working, we’ve improved that process a lot using a tool called Strap ( https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap and https://macos-strap.herokuapp.com/ ) — which helps get a few basic things installed. And then from there we have a collection of scripts which install other things that are needed. I ran into a few hiccups along the way but got it working still relatively quickly compared to doing it manually.

One tool we used was homebrew, which has an extension called cask which lets you use the command line or a configuration file called a Brewfile to install regular mac apps. This actually is really handy since there are a bunch of other apps I want to install beyond the basics. So I’ve set up a Brewfile in my Dropbox to install some other apps with homebrew cask (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask). Then you run brew bundle to install the apps from this file.

I first download Chrome since I’m not really a Safari guy. I like to reconfigure the terminal theme early. However what I’ve noticed is it seems it’s much easier to get a new machine closer to ready to use since a lot more of the things I’m doing are cloud based, as well as the files. This is different than setting up a computer a number of years ago for me. I install Dropbox pretty early to sync files, which takes quite a while.