Laptop

Laptop is a script to set up an OS X computer for web development.

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.

Requirements

I support clean installations of these operating systems:

• 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.

Install

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 each of these two commands one at a time, then press return after each one to download and execute the script, respectively:

curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monfresh/laptop/master/mac
bash mac 2>&1 | tee ~/laptop.log && source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

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.

What it sets up

• Bundler for managing Ruby gems
• Flux for adjusting your Mac's display color so you can sleep better
• GitHub for Mac 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
• Postgres for storing relational data
• Qt for headless JavaScript testing via Capybara Webkit
• RVM for managing Ruby versions (includes the latest Ruby)
• Sublime Text 3 for coding all the things
• Zsh as your shell

It should take less than 15 minutes to install (depends on your machine and internet connection).

The script also lightly customizes your Zsh 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 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.

Customize in ~/.laptop.local

# Go to your OS X user's root directory
cd ~

# Download the sample file to your computer
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monfresh/laptop/master/.laptop.local

# open the file in Sublime Text
subl .laptop.local

Your ~/.laptop.local is run at the end of the mac script. Put your customizations there. You can use the .laptop.local you downloaded above to get started. It lets you install the following tools (commented out by default):

• 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

To install any of the above tools, uncomment them from .laptop.local by removing the #. For example, to install CloudApp, your .laptop.local should look like this:

#!/bin/sh

# brew_cask_install 'atom'
brew_cask_install 'cloud'
# brew_cask_install 'firefox'
# brew_cask_install 'iterm2'

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, brew_install_or_upgrade, gem_install_or_update, and brew_cask_install can be used in your ~/.laptop.local.

Debugging

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 lines where the script failed into a new GitHub Issue for me. Or, attach the whole log file as an attachment.

Credits

This laptop script is inspired by thoughbot's laptop script.

Public domain

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.