Development on OS X

A few notes to myself on developing on OS X 10.6 (snow leopard).

Paths

The default path used by OS X to look for software is:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin

To confirm this, on the command line just type:

echo $PATH

Software updates from Apple are generally installed in the first three locations defined in the path. The last one, /usr/local, is by convention where I can put other software without it being over-written by Apple’s updates. This is particularly useful if I want to update already-installed software. If I go down this route, then the path needs to be updated in ~/.profile so that /usr/local/bin is searched before the other three default locations:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

However, care should be taken. Having different software versions running on the same machine can cause confusion.

See hivelogic for more information.

MacPorts

http://www.macports.org/

Software is installed using sudo port install and is installed in /opt/local (hence the line export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH added to ~/.profile when first installing macports)

See http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#defaultprefix.

To check what MacPorts are installed:

port installed

To keep MacPorts up to date run:

sudo port -v selfupdate

(I have just re-installed ImageMagick using MacPorts, which has an awful lot of dependencies and installs them all under /opt/local/bin, even though many of them are already installed in /usr/bin)

Homebrew

Homebrew may be a better idea than Macports. See http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/homebrew-os-xs-missing-package-manager/

I am using it now and have successfully installed mongodb into /usr/local using homebrew.

Gems

To avoid confusion, I always try to install gems as root using sudo (Every now and again I move my ~/.gems folder to the trash to remove any gems I have accidentally installed locally). The only reason not to have my gems working system wide is if I wanted to be running different development environments with different gem versions. I am pretty sure I don’t, because it is unlikely I could deal with the ensuing confusion.

Don’t forget to regularly run:

sudo gem update