Setting up my MacBook Pro

I received a Mac for work. It’s beautiful, it’s fancy, and I have no idea how to use it. I’m going to summarize here the steps I followed to set up my laptop, in particular getting git, python, and a compile environment.

Git

First up, git of course. Mac does not ship with an equivalent of apt-get, but you can install one of several package managers. I went for Homebrew. I didn’t want to have to install it in sudo mode (not sure this was such a big deal, in the end), so I decided to install it in my personal folder (/Users/local). But to make it possible to execute the softwares installed via Homebrew from any directory, I had to add the path to the directory where I installed Homebrew to my PATH. This is done by modifying the file paths

sudo vim /etc/paths

Also, during the install, I had to install the command-line tools from XCode. This part was handled automatically by Mac App Store. Once Homebrew was installed, I updated and upgraded

brew update
brew upgrade

With Homebrew installed, I can next install git with a simple command

brew install git

This installation of git ships with a bunch of other app, like gitk. The latter requires to have jdk installed, which I did from the website (can’t find the link now).

Next, I need autocomplete to make it work. For that you can simply install bash-completion

brew install bash-completion

Then you need to point you bashrc file to that command.

Update 2021-02-17

I didn’t have to change the file /etc/paths. I directly changed $PATH in my .zshrc file. I suppose the modification of the /etc/paths is more solid, but so far I haven’t run into any complications. For the auto-completion, I added

autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

to my .zshrc file. To add the git branch in my terminal prompt (btw, brew install iterm), I added

source /Users/bencrestel/Work/other/zsh_setup/zsh-git-prompt/zshrc.sh

after cloning the repo zsh-git-prompt. I fine-tuned the aspect of the prompt and ended up with

PROMPT='%B%F{blue}%n%f@%F{green}%m%f:%F{red}%~%b%f$(git_super_status) %# '

Docker

Still using Homebrew, I could install docker. However to have the nice Docker GUI with it, I had to use cask,

brew cask install docker

Update 2021-02-17

To specify a cask, now you need to do

brew install --cask docker

I also installed the desktop app.

Jekyll

Jekyll is nice to power simple, efficient blogs. You install via Ruby, and the instructions provided here were sufficient, except for a few jekyll modules (jekyll-gist, jekyll-seo-tag,…) which I had to install using gem again. But it worked in the end.

Update 2021-02-17

This time I installed ruby 3.0, which seems to work a bit differently. The first steps in the above link are still required, but next to install missing dependencies (webrick, kramdown-parser-gfm, jekyll-watch,…), I had to use bundle add <...>. This install the missing dependencies locally, only for your project. The only piece that I was missing was a Gemfile; you can simply create a text file with that name and add the single line source "https://rubygems.org". Then everytime you do bundle add <...>, it adds a new line to that Gemfile with that new dependency.

pipenv

Next, and still using Homebrew, I installed pipenv, which seems to be a nice lightweight environment manager that can be useful for software development. A nice little intro video is posted on that website.

pyenv

Pyenv is meant to be a simpler way to define environments. I installed via Homebrew. Then to create a Python 3.6 environment, you do

pyenv init
pyenv install 3.6.0

Note: It never worked for me