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| title: Towards a Really Clean System | ||
| layout: post | ||
| year: 2010 | ||
| published: true | ||
| --- | ||
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| Some time ago, "Yehuda Katz":http://yehudakatz.com/ posted some ideas on how to keep "his system":http://yehudakatz.com/2009/05/15/quest-for-a-clean-machine/ and "his code directories":http://yehudakatz.com/2009/05/30/my-code-directory/ 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. | ||
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| h3. How I Fucked it up - Big Time | ||
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| 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":http://www.macports.org/ 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. | ||
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| 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. | ||
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| h3. Towards a Better Environment | ||
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| 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. | ||
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| 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. | ||
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| h3. My Clean Setup | ||
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| 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! | ||
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| h4. Basic Setup | ||
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| 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. | ||
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| Next, I needed Xcode. I decided to get the "newest version online":http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/ instead of installing the older one from the Snow Leopard DVD. | ||
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| Finally, since I use the shell a lot, I needed some decent setup there as well. I use "zsh":http://www.zsh.org/ like pretty much every (Rails) developer I know because it's awesome. Taking a shortcut with configuration, I went with "Ryan Bates'":http://railscasts.com "dotfiles":http://github.com/ryanb/dotfiles as they provide a good starting place. | ||
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| h4. Homebrew | ||
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| Thanks to some recommendations via Twitter, I tried out "Homewbrew":http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew. Apparently, it's *the* new cool thing in terms of package management - at least if you believe "the hype":http://twitter.com/#search?q=%40machomebrew. 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. | ||
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| After first having it installed in <code>/usr/local</code> (just as the README suggests), I decided to move it to my home directory - <code>$HOME/local</code>, to be more exact, because I wanted it to be separated from the rest of my home folder's contents. I decided against <code>/usr/local</code> not because I anticipated that someone else might use my laptop (I'd have to kill them) but rather because some intrusive pieces of software occasionally dump their stuff in <code>/usr/local</code> (e.g. the LaTeX packages for OS X). I just to want to keep an eye on what I installed and be able to easily remove it without thinking about potentially breaking other software. Another plus is that I can leave <code>/usr/local</code> as being owned by root and still can install everything via Homebrew without sudo-ing. | ||
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| Don't forget to add <code>$HOME/local/bin</code> and <code>$HOME/local/sbin</code> to your path. | ||
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| h4. Gem setup | ||
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| Another thing I needed to avoid sudo-ing was setting gems to be installed in my home directory. "Pat Allan's":http://freelancing-gods.com "gist":http://gist.github.com/217895 shows you how to do that. After that, it's just <code>gem install whatever</code> to install any gem you might need - no sudo, thank you very much. | ||
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| You should also add <code>$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin</code> to your path so binaries of any gems are executable. | ||
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| h4. Documents | ||
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| 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. | ||
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| Thus, I decided to use "Dropbox":http://www.dropbox.com/. 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":https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTMyMjM2Mjc5 - thanks!). I then symlink folders where they belong - say, I have presentations, I'd keep all local-only presentations in <code>Documents/Presentations</code> and symlink <code>Dropbox/Presentations</code> to <code>Documents/Presentations/Shared</code>. | ||
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| h4. Code | ||
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| As I mentioned earlier, I've lost track on all my local repositories because they were just everywhere. | ||
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| With my new setup, everything (with the exception of Homewbrew) now sits in a hidden folder called <code>.repositories</code> in my home folder. Seeing what code I have on my machine is now just a matter of calling <code>ls ~/.repositories</code>. | ||
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| Flat structures don't scale very well, obviously, so I added some structure. I placed a <code>Development</code> folder in my home directory and created some suitable subfolders like <code>Rails</code> and <code>Ruby</code>. In these, there are subfolders like <code>Plugins</code> and similar which contain symlinked directories that point to their respective repository in <code>.repositories</code>. | ||
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| h4. Projects | ||
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| 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 <code>Documents</code> folder. | ||
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| Now I have a <code>Projects</code> 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>Code</code> (pointing to some folder in <code>Development</code>) and <code>Documents</code> (pointing, obviously, to some subfolder of my main <code>Documents</code> folder). You can take the whole thing to the extreme and drag all your clients' emails, relevant weblinks etc. to their respective project's <code>Documents</code> folder and really have *everything* in one place. | ||
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| 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 <code>project PROJECT_NAME</code> which would then open the <code>Documents</code> folder in the Finder and the <code>Code</code> folder in TextMate. | ||
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| h4. Miscellaneous | ||
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| Speaking of TextMate: I don't like shell scripts like <code>mate</code> or <code>gitx</code> lurking around in <code>/usr/local</code>, so I created a <code>bin</code> folder in my home directory, moved these scripts there and added <code>$HOME/bin</code> to the path. | ||
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| If you use "Passenger":http://www.modrails.com/ for development, you can keep your Apache's <code>httpd.conf</code> clean by keeping the Passenger stuff in a separate file in <code>/private/etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf</code>. The "Passenger Preference Pane":http://www.fngtps.com/2008/09/passenger-preference-pane-v1-1 does this too by keeping the vhost configurations in <code>/private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts</code>. | ||
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| h3. The New Workflows | ||
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| Installing packages: | ||
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| <pre> | ||
| brew install PACKAGE_NAME | ||
| </pre> | ||
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| Installing a gem: | ||
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| <pre> | ||
| gem install GEM_NAME | ||
| </pre> | ||
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| Adding a new code repository: | ||
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| <pre> | ||
| git clone REPOSITORY_URL ~/.repositories/REPOSITORY_NAME | ||
| ln -s ~/.repositories/REPOSITORY_NAME ~/Development/some/path/REPOSITORY_NAME | ||
| </pre> | ||
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| Adding a new project (after setting up the repository): | ||
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| <pre> | ||
| 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 | ||
| </pre> | ||
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| Sharing documents across my computers: | ||
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| <pre> | ||
| 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 | ||
| </pre> | ||
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| h3. Where Does it Go From Here? | ||
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| The possibilities are endless. You could, for example, | ||
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| * 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. | ||
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| 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. |