Laptop

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.

Requirements

We support:

• macOS Catalina
• 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.

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 the command below, then press return.

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cisagov/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, make sure to 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 hitting return in your Terminal.

What it sets up

• ChromeDriver for headless website testing
• chruby for managing Ruby versions (or, when using a fish shell, rbenv)
• Docker for all your containerization needs
• [GitHub Desktop] for setting up your SSH keys automatically
• Homebrew for managing operating system libraries
• [Homebrew Services] so you can easily stop, start, and restart services
• [nvm] for managing Node.js versions if you do not have Node.js already installed (Includes latest Node.js and NPM, for running apps and installing JavaScript packages)
• pyenv for managing Python versions if you do not have Python already installed (includes the latest 3.x Python)
• ruby-install for installing different versions of Ruby
• Virtualenv for creating isolated Python environments (via pyenv if it is installed)
• Virtualenvwrapper for extending Virtualenv (via pyenv if it is installed)
• Zsh as your shell, if you choose to switch from Bash

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

Customize in ~/.laptop.local and ~/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. This repo already contains a .laptop.local and Brewfile.local you can use to get started.

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

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

It lets you install the following tools and apps:

• VSCode - Microsoft's open source text editor
• Atom - GitHub's open source text editor
• Sublime Text 3 for coding all the things
• Vim for those who prefer the command line
• Exuberant Ctags for indexing files for vim tab completion
• Firefox for testing your website on a browser other than Chrome
• iTerm2 - an awesome replacement for the OS X Terminal
• reattach-to-user-namespace to allow copy and paste from Tmux
• Tmux for saving project state and switching between projects
• Spectacle - automatic window manipulation

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.

What about background services (Redis, Postgres, MySQL, etc.)?

The script does not automatically install services like databases because you may not need any particular one, or you may need specific versions, not just the latest. For services, we recommend using Docker. For example, you can use the [docker run] command to start a service in a container and make the container's port available to your local machine:

docker run -p 5432 postgres:10.6

You can also use Docker Compose to define your app's containers and their relationships, cutting out the need to manually setup each service.

How to switch your shell back to bash from zsh (or vice versa)

1. Find out which shell you're currently running: echo $SHELL

2. Find out the location of the shell you want to switch to. For example, if you want to switch to bash, run which bash.

3. Verify if the shell location is included in /etc/shells. Run cat /etc/shells to see the contents of the file.

4. If the location of the shell is included, run chsh -s [the location of the shell]. For example, if which bash returned /bin/bash, you would run chsh -s /bin/bash.

   If the location of the shell is not in /etc/shells, add it, then run the chsh command. If you have Sublime Text, you can open the file by running subl /etc/shells.

5. Quit and restart Terminal (or iTerm2), or open a new tab for the new shell to take effect.

Whether you're using bash or zsh, we recommend installing the latest versions with Homebrew because the versions that came with your Mac are really old.

brew install bash

or

brew install zsh

Credits

The cisagov laptop script is based on and inspired by 18F's laptop script, which is based on and inspired by thoughtbot's laptop script.

Public domain

thoughtbot's original work remains covered under an MIT License.

CISA and 18F's work on this project is in the worldwide public domain, as are contributions to our 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.