Some time ago, Yehuda Katz posted some ideas on how to keep his system and his code directories clean. When I had issues with my MacBook Pro lately (which was still on Leopard), I finally decided to just erase everything and start a clean Snow Leopard setup like I did with my iMac a couple of months ago.
How I Fucked it up - Big Time
I bought my MBP back in 2007 and it was my first Mac - and although I had used Linux for a while before and compiled some things every now and then, I didn’t know a whole lot about compiling, let alone about Mac OS X’s internals and just followed tutorials. So, naturally, everything got a bit messy quite soon - and even more messy after I stumbled across MacPorts and decided that it might suit me just fine. So I ended up with probably 3 different version of MySQL, Ruby etc. - scattered in /Library, /usr/local and /opt.
Pretty much the same thing held true for my code, documents, etc.: Everything was all over the place and while it had some kind of structure, it certainly wasn’t organized all that well. Finally, when I started to do full-time freelancing, I became increasingly frustrated by the fact that my code was in some place and specifications, examples etc. that I had received from my client were somewhere else entirely.
Towards a Better Environment
A couple of weeks ago, I used my iMac as a kind of test environment for better organization. I did this because I use my MBP every day at work and can’t really risk having issues with it. The iMac, on the other hand, is my home computer and while I do use it for development at home, I still have my MBP as a fallback if something goes wrong.
I had a couple of iterations where I tried out different things and switched to the next idea whenever I was unhappy with the result of the last iteration. After some iterations, I think I’ve finally found a setup that works for me.
My Clean Setup
Disclaimer: My environment suits me - that’s why it’s my environment. If it doesn’t suit you, it might at least give you some ideas for your own perfect setup. However, I’m glad to hear some opinions on what I might want to change to further improve it!
Basic Setup
First of all, of course, I installed Snow Leopard. Since I had messed up my setup so badly, I decided to completely erase my disk (after doing a full Time Machine backup, of course) and set up a clean OS X.
Next, I needed Xcode. I decided to get the newest version online instead of installing the older one from the Snow Leopard DVD.
Finally, since I use the shell a lot, I needed some decent setup there as well. I use zsh like pretty much every (Rails) developer I know because it’s awesome. Taking a shortcut with configuration, I went with Ryan Bates’ dotfiles as they provide a good starting place.
Homebrew
Thanks to some recommendations via Twitter, I tried out Homebrew. Apparently, it’s the new cool thing in terms of package management - at least if you believe the hype. One of the things that really ate up disk space when I was still using MacPorts was that it always installed a real shitload of unnecessary stuff - mostly optional packages and stuff I already had installed by hand or via a DMG (and MacPorts doesn’t care about anything but itself). Homebrew significantly decreases this overhead and it’s really clean.
After first having it installed in /usr/local (just as the
README suggests), I decided to move it to my home directory -
$HOME/local, to be more exact, because I wanted it to be
separated from the rest of my home folder’s contents. I decided against
/usr/local not because I anticipated that someone else
might use my laptop (I’d have to kill them) but rather because some
intrusive pieces of software occasionally dump their stuff in
/usr/local (e.g. the LaTeX packages for OS X). I just want
to keep an eye on what I installed and be able to easily remove it
without thinking about potentially breaking other software. Another plus
is that I can leave /usr/local as being owned by root and
still can install everything via Homebrew without sudo-ing.
Don’t forget to add $HOME/local/bin and
$HOME/local/sbin to your path.
Gem setup
Another thing I needed to avoid sudo-ing was setting gems to be
installed in my home directory. Pat
Allan’s
gist shows you how to do that. After
that, it’s just gem install whatever to install any gem you
might need - no sudo, thank you very much.
You should also add $HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin to your path so
binaries of any gems are executable.
Documents
Although I don’t really need to share my documents between my iMac and my MBP, I still want to - and I don’t want to do it manually. After toying a bit with symlinking my iDisk contents on both machines, I decided that it was too slow and - even more importantly - wasn’t suitable because it doesn’t keep local copies which would have basically ruled out offline usage - not good.
Thus, I decided to use Dropbox. I don’t need
to sync a whole lot of stuff, so the free plan with 2GB is more than
enough for me at the moment (by the way, if you sign up because you’re
reading this, I’d appreciate it if you could use my referral
link - thanks!). I then
symlink folders where they belong - say, I have presentations, I’d keep
all local-only presentations in Documents/Presentations and
symlink Dropbox/Presentations to
Documents/Presentations/Shared.
Code
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve lost track on all my local repositories because they were just everywhere.
With my new setup, everything (with the exception of Homewbrew) now sits
in a hidden folder called .repositories in my home folder.
Seeing what code I have on my machine is now just a matter of calling
ls \~/.repositories.
Flat structures don’t scale very well, obviously, so I added some
structure. I placed a Development folder in my home
directory and created some suitable subfolders like Rails
and Ruby. In these, there are subfolders like
Plugins and similar which contain symlinked directories
that point to their respective repository in .repositories.
Projects
I already indicated that one of the things I didn’t like about my old
setup was that a project’s code was in one place and specs, documents
and other non-code stuff was somewhere in my Documents
folder.
Now I have a Projects folder in my home directory that
contains subdirectories for clients which in turn contain subdirectories
for every single project. These projects then usually contain two
symlinked folders, Code (pointing to some folder in
Development) and Documents (pointing,
obviously, to some subfolder of my main Documents folder).
You can take the whole thing to the extreme and drag all your clients’
emails, relevant weblinks etc. to their respective project’s
Documents folder and really have everything in one
place.
I haven’t done this yet, but obviously it would be easy to write a
little shell script or alias that would enable you to just type
something like project PROJECT_NAME which would then open
the Documents folder in the Finder and the
Code folder in TextMate.
Miscellaneous
Speaking of TextMate: I don’t like shell scripts like mate
or gitx lurking around in /usr/local, so I
created a bin folder in my home directory, moved these
scripts there and added $HOME/bin to the path.
If you use Passenger for development, you
can keep your Apache’s httpd.conf clean by keeping the
Passenger stuff in a separate file in
/private/etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf. The Passenger
Preference
Pane does
this too by keeping the vhost configurations in
/private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts.
The New Workflows
Installing packages:
brew install PACKAGE_NAME
Installing a gem:
gem install GEM_NAME
Adding a new code repository:
git clone REPOSITORY_URL ~/.repositories/REPOSITORY_NAME
ln -s ~/.repositories/REPOSITORY_NAME ~/Development/some/path/REPOSITORY_NAME
Adding a new project (after setting up the repository):
mkdir ~/Projects/some/path/PROJECT_NAME
ln -s ~/Development/some/path/REPOSITORY_NAME ~/Projects/some/path/PROJECT_NAME/Code
ln -s ~/Documents/some/path/PROJECT_NAME ~/Projects/some/path/PROJECT_NAME/Documents
Sharing documents across my computers:
cp /some/folder/or/file ~/Dropbox/Documents/some/folder/or/file
# if it belongs to some existing folder:
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Documents/some/folder/or/file ~/Documents/some/folder/Shared
Where Does it Go From Here?
The possibilities are endless. You could, for example,
- create shell scripts and aliases that facilitate either of the tasks
- symlink the logs of applications to their project’s folder so that you can view them more easily
- buy more Dropbox space and also use it for music, movies, IRC transcripts, …
- etc.
Personally, I’m happy with my setup for now. I can’t say that I’ll always be happy with it but at the moment it seems to be exactly what I want.
Update (13/2/2010)
As I’ve run into a real dependency hell while toying with Rails 3, I recently installed Ruby Version Manager (rvm). I can now warmly recommend using this awesome piece of software if you have (or want) to juggle with multiple Ruby versions and (gem) environments. You can read some details of what made me install it in my post on Avoiding Rails 3 Dependency Hell With RVM.