Ruby Development on the Mac

Moving in a new direction, I’ve taken up a position as a Rails developer and am documenting the setup process on OS X as the tutorials out there once again felt a bit lacking – leaving out some crucial bits.

I’ll be developing on Ubuntu at work (which had a much easier setup), but I like to play around on my iMac at home and thus need to have Rails running on there as well.

Don’t even bother with RVM on OS X – it did just enough damage to have me almost having to reinstall Homebrew.

OK, let’s get started.

Prepare your Mac for local Laravel development

After first struggling for years with setting up my Mac for local development by trying to update the pre-installed version of PHP and then adding mcrypt, MySQL and whichever other components, I finally started using Homebrew while simultaneously switching from Apache to nginx. This was a huge improvement from what I was used to, but Taylor Otwell gifted us with an even better solution with Laravel Homestead.

Even though it does come with setup instructions, there are many steps involved when starting from scratch. It was also frustrating when things broke during setup, since certain things are assumed from people installing the software. Never assume.

So, I worked through a few separate tutorials and compiled this all-in-one list of what to do. Here we go!

Leopard Web Development Setup

I cobbled this together from a few sources to set up your local PHP/MySQL development environment on a stock OS X Leopard installation with VMware Fusion.

Repair /etc

If you managed to break your OS X installation so badly that it’s come to this, you can repair it with:

/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /
ln -s /private/etc etc
/sbin/fsck -fy
chown root:wheel /etc

And, yes, it is possible to do this to yourself…