Laptop is a script to set up an OS X computer for web development, and to keep it up to date.
It can be run multiple times on the same machine safely. It installs, upgrades, or skips packages based on what is already installed on the machine.
This particular version of the script is geared toward beginners who want to set up a Ruby on Rails environment on their Mac. More advanced users can easily customize the script to install additional tools. To see an example of a more advanced script, check out 18F/laptop.
I support clean installations of these operating systems:
- macOS Sierra (10.12)
- OS X El Capitan (10.11)
- OS X Yosemite (10.10)
- OS X Mavericks (10.9)
Older versions may work but aren't regularly tested. Bug reports for older versions are welcome.
Begin by opening the Terminal application on your Mac. The easiest way to open
an application in OS X is to search for it via Spotlight. The default
keyboard shortcut for invoking Spotlight is command-Space
. Once Spotlight
is up, just start typing the first few letters of the app you are looking for,
and once it appears, press return
to launch it.
In your Terminal window, copy and paste the command below, then press return
.
bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aksswami/laptop/master/laptop)
The script itself is available in this repo for you to review if you want to see what it does and how it works.
Note that the script will ask you to enter your OS X password at various points. This is the same password that you use to log in to your Mac. If you don't already have it installed, GitHub for Mac will launch automatically at the end of the script so you can set up everything you'll need to push code to GitHub.
Once the script is done, quit and relaunch Terminal.
More detailed instructions with a video are available in the Wiki.
It is highly recommended to run the script regularly to keep your computer up
to date. Once the script has been installed, you'll be able to run it at your
convenience by typing laptop
and pressing return
in your Terminal.
Your last Laptop run will be saved to a file called laptop.log
in your home
folder. Read through it to see if you can debug the issue yourself. If not,
copy the entire contents of laptop.log
into a
new GitHub Issue for me.
Or, attach the whole log file as an attachment.
- Bundler for managing Ruby gems
- chruby for managing Ruby versions
- Flux for adjusting your Mac's display color so you can sleep better
- GitHub Desktop for setting up your SSH keys automatically
- Heroku Toolbelt for deploying and managing Heroku apps
- Homebrew for managing operating system libraries
- Homebrew Cask for quickly installing Mac apps from the command line
- Homebrew Services so you can easily stop, start, and restart services
- hub for interacting with the GitHub API
- PhantomJS for headless website testing
- Postgres for storing relational data
- ruby-install for installing different versions of Ruby
- Sublime Text 3 for coding all the things
- Zsh as your shell (if you opt in)
It should take less than 15 minutes to install (depends on your machine and internet connection).
The script also lightly customizes your shell prompt so that it displays your
current directory in orange, followed by the current Ruby version or gemset in
green, and sets the prompt character to $
. It also allows you to easily
distinguish directories from files when running ls
by displaying directories
in a different color. Below is a screenshot showing what the colors look like
when using the default Terminal white background, the Solarized Dark theme, and the Solarized Light theme.
If you want to use the Solarized themes, run the following commands in your Terminal:
cd ~
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomislav/osx-terminal.app-colors-solarized/master/Solarized%20Dark.terminal
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomislav/osx-terminal.app-colors-solarized/master/Solarized%20Light.terminal
open Solarized%20Dark.terminal
open Solarized%20Light.terminal
This will add the Solarized themes to your Terminal's Profiles, and if you want to set one of them as the default, go to your Terminal's Preferences, click on the Settings tab, scroll down to the Solarized Profile, click on it, then click the Default button. When you open a new window or tab (or if you quit and relaunch Terminal), it will use the Solarized theme.
If you want to try out different prompt colors other than orange and green,
open your .zshrc
or .bash_profile
in Sublime Text:
subl ~/.zshrc
Then in the line that starts with precmd
, replace {166}
and {65}
with
any of the 256 possible Xterm colors.
Save the file, then open a new Terminal window or tab to see the changes.
# Go to your OS X user's root directory
cd ~
# Download the sample files to your computer
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aksswami/laptop/master/.laptop.local
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aksswami/laptop/master/Brewfile.local
# open the files in Sublime Text
subl .laptop.local
subl Brewfile.local
Your ~/.laptop.local
is run at the end of the mac
script.
Put your customizations there. If you want to install additional
tools or Mac apps with Homebrew, add them to your ~/Brewfile.local
.
You can use the .laptop.local
and Brewfile.local
you downloaded
above to get started. It lets you install the following tools and Mac apps:
- Atom - GitHub's open source text editor
- CloudApp for sharing screenshots and making an animated GIF from a video
- Firefox for testing your Rails app on a browser other than Chrome or Safari
- iTerm2 - an awesome replacement for the OS X Terminal
- Redis for storing key-value data
Write your customizations such that they can be run safely more than once.
See the mac
script for examples.
Laptop functions such as fancy_echo
, and gem_install_or_update
can be used
in your ~/.laptop.local
.
The script does not automatically launch these services after installation because you might not need or want them to be running. With Homebrew Services, starting, stopping, or restarting these services is as easy as:
brew services start|stop|restart [name of service]
For example:
brew services start postgresql
To see a list of all installed services:
brew services list
To start all services at once:
brew services start --all
-
Find out which shell you're currently running:
echo $SHELL
-
Find out the location of the shell you want to switch to. For example, if you want to switch to
bash
, runwhich bash
. -
Verify if the shell location is included in
/etc/shells
. Runcat /etc/shells
to see the contents of the file. -
If the location of the shell is included, run
chsh -s [the location of the shell]
. For example, ifwhich bash
returned/bin/bash
, you would runchsh -s /bin/bash
.If the location of the shell is not in
/etc/shells
, add it, then run thechsh
command. If you have Sublime Text, you can open the file by runningsubl /etc/shells
.
This laptop script is inspired by thoughbot's laptop script.
thoughtbot's original work remains covered under an MIT License.
My work on this project is in the worldwide public domain, as are contributions to my project. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:
This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.