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laptop

Tools for setting up a new Mac laptop for development

Background

I've heard other developers talk about how they have a setup script that they use to migrate from one development machine to another. A quick Google search turned up the thoughtbot/laptop repo. I looked through the source and decided I wanted something slightly different. The thoughtbot script requires you to use zsh, but I wanted to use bash. It also installs some tools that I don't use, and I wanted to add others, so I customized it to fit my needs.

Running the mac.sh script

The main setup script is in mac.sh. This script and the installation instructions below are largely copied from https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop.

Customize

To customize your local version, edit the .laptop.local file. It will be run by the mac.sh script as the final step. This is a good place to add the various apps and CLIs that you like to use for development.

Install

Fork and clone this repo, then cd into it.

Review the script (avoid running scripts you haven't read!):

less mac.sh

Execute the downloaded script:

sh mac.sh 2>&1 | tee ~/laptop.log

Optionally, review the log:

less ~/laptop.log

Dotfiles

Dotfiles are configuration files for various tools, such as .bash_profile for the bash shell. Most likely, you've already made your own modifications to various dotfiles, and you will want to take these with you when setting up a new machine.

Once you've run the mac.sh installation script, you will have rcm installed in your terminal. This is a management tool that allows you to locate your dotfiles in a folder outside of your home folder, which makes it easier to copy them back and forth to your own git repository.

Follow these steps to manage your dotfiles:

  1. Replace the files in the dotfiles folder with your own custom dotfiles. Remove leading .s in the filenames. However, don't remove dotfiles/rcrc. This is a configuration file for rcrc, which manages the configuration for rcm.
  2. Update dotfiles/rcrc by updating DOTFILES_DIRS="<path_to_dotfiles>" with the local path to your dotfiles folder in this repo.
  3. Run this command: env RCRC=/<path_to_this_repo_on_your_machine>/dotfiles/rcrc rcup

To see the list of dotfiles that are now symlinked to your home folder, run: lsrc. You'll see something like this:

/Users/alexnitta/.bash_profile:/Users/alexnitta/code/laptop/dotfiles/bash_profile
/Users/alexnitta/.bashrc:/Users/alexnitta/code/laptop/dotfiles/bashrc
/Users/alexnitta/.gitconfig:/Users/alexnitta/code/laptop/dotfiles/gitconfig
/Users/alexnitta/.rcrc:/Users/alexnitta/code/laptop/dotfiles/rcrc

You can verify this by cding to your home directory, then running ls -la . | grep "\->" to see only the symlinks.

Any time you add a new dotfile in your local repo, you can run rcup to add a symlink for it. Push your changes up to GitHub, and now you have a portable dotfiles setup.

App-specific notes

VS Code

Visual Studio Code has a Settings Sync feature that helps when moving to a new machine.