Setting Up Mac OS X Tiger for Web Development

Setting up a new Mac as a web development workstation takes a little bit more work than just installing Textmate. These are my notes of the process (mainly for myself to make future installations faster).

The Basics

• Install TextMate
  • Configure Finder to open ALL possible coding-related documents with TM
  • Install also the terminal extention. Test by running mate foo.txt in terminal
  • Install or sync (with other machines) all necassary bundles. They are located in ~/Library/Application Support/Textmate
• Install Transmit
  • Copy settings from other machines ~/Library/Preferences/com.panic.Transmit3.plist
  • Sync bookmarks
• Install SSHKeychain
  • The Universal binary is there. Just not very well in sight.
• Install Subversion
  • There are several pre-built packages available
• Install MySQL
  • 5.x versions have nice .dmg + installer packages, installation is very easy
  • Add /usr/local/mysql/bin to PATH
  • After installation, secure the initial installation
  • Set password for root with SET PASSWORD FOR ‘root’@’localhost’ = PASSWORD(‘myelitepasswd’);
  • phpMyAdmin is a must-have. Best installed under ~/Sites or /Sites
• PostgreSQL, if needed
  • Marc Liyanages package + docs seem to be the easiest.
  • See also ADC document PostgreSQL on Mac OS X
• Install PHP for bundled Apache 1.3
  • Again, Marc Liyanages package is propably the easiest to set up

Setting Up Python

• Install Python 2.4+
  • There are great pre-built binaries for Python 2.4 and 2.5
• Install some of the batteries that were forgotten in the “batteries included” philosophy:
  • python-markdown
  • BeautifulSoup
  • PIL, psycopg2, MySQLdb, python-dateutil, pysqlite2 (for 2.4)
• Install IPython
  • Download the source and install. This is very easy for Python 2.4+
• Add /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin to PATH and everything Just Works :)

Setting Up Django

I like to live dangerously. So:

   svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django_src
   ln -s /path/to/installation_directory/django_src/django /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django
   

That’s it. Django works. Now add export PYTHONPATH=/where/you/develop to your .bash_profile and finally copy django_src/django/bin/django-admin.py to somewhere in your path (for example in /usr/local/bin).

Localization issues

• Configure Terminal.app for Finnish chars
  • Jussis tutorial and another for .inputrc

Are We There Yet?

Unfortunately that’s just the nerdy part of the setup-process. Next up is installing browsers, browser plugins (did I hear Firebug?) and all that jazz. I’m not going to get into those in this post, though.

I recenty listed all my favourite apps in iusethis.com (you can log in via OpenID). Please share your comments, suggestions or own favourite apps in the comments.