How We Work: Axel’s Setup
Axel, one of our great RoR dev, just shared his development environment. I know that a lot of you are pretty curious so I thought that we should share it here:
Brew, Zsh, Git and RVM
This first post purpose is to guide you through my environment setup.
Brew
Brew is a package manager for MacOS X. It will let you install a bunch of UNIX tools that aren’t included in the system.
Packages are installed into their own isolated prefixes and then symlinked into “/usr/local” where binaries are located in “/usr/local/bin”.
MacOS X is POSIX compliant, so you already have a “/usr/local/bin” in your PATH environment variable even though MacOS X doesn’t use this directory.
This working way permits brew to avoid a package management database like fink or macports.
Another advantage of homebrew compared to fink and macports is that it reuses the programs you already have installed in your system rather than taking an isolated system approach preventing you from having yet another version of a library to install when you already have it.
Moreover, it will let you install and manage programs without using the sudo command, preventing your from security issues and messing things up.
Oh and one more thing: it’s written in Ruby!
Go check it at http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
ZSH
Several months ago, I decided to switch from bash to zsh because of its great features (advanced file globbing, spelling correction, programmable tab completion…), what else?
While I was searching for some documentation on how to customize the shell to fit my own needs (essentially adding git integration), I found an awesome git repository which aim is to centralize some zsh configurations: oh-my-zsh. It will let you tweak your zsh shell with a modular approach by including some extra shell scripts (plugins) to extend your experience (e.g. git integration). oh-my-zsh also offers a bunch of themes out of the box, so you just can use it right away and modify it later on for your own needs.
Here is the installation process:
[To read the rest of the article, check out Axel’s blog.]
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