fresh-brew

fresh-brew is a script that will set up a basic development environment on your Mac with Homebrew, Apple's Command Line Tools, and Git.

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.

You can also easily customize the script to install additional tools.

What's supported

Supported chips:

• Apple Silicon M1
• Intel

Supported macOS versions:

• Big Sur
• Catalina
• Mojave

Supported shells:

• bash
• zsh
• fish

Installation

Begin by opening the Terminal application on your Mac. The easiest way to open an application in macOS 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/monfresh/fresh-brew/main/fresh-press)

For fish shell:

bash (curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monfresh/fresh-brew/main/fresh-press | psub)

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 might ask you to enter your macOS password at various points. This is the same password that you use to log in to your Mac. The prompt comes from Homebrew, because it needs permissions to write to the /usr/local (or /opt/homebrew on M1 Macs) directory.

Once the script is done, quit and relaunch Terminal.

Debugging script failures

Your last fresh-brew run will be saved to a file called fresh-brew.log in your home folder. Read through it to see if you can debug the issue yourself. If not, copy the entire contents of fresh-brew.log into a new GitHub Issue, or attach the whole log file to the issue.

How to tell if the script worked

If you see "All done!" at the bottom of your terminal, then everything the script was meant to do worked. Now make sure you quit and restart your terminal.

To verify that your dev environment is properly configured, run these commands:

brew doctor

You should see a message that "Your system is ready to brew."

Next steps

The next thing you'll want to do after running the script is to configure Git with your name, email, and preferred editor.

What it sets up

• GitHub CLI brings GitHub to your terminal.
• Homebrew for managing operating system libraries
• Nodenv to easily install and manage Node versions
• Yarn to manage JS dependencies

Customize in /fresh-brew.local and /Brewfile.local

By adding these two files inside your project, you can customize each project with different tools. Note that tools installed via Homebrew will be available globally, so if you need two different versions of a tool for different projects, this script might not work for you.

For an example of a customization that should work across projects, view the fresh-brew.local and Brewfile.local in this repo, or download them:

# Download the sample files to your computer
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monfresh/fresh-brew/main/fresh-brew.local
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monfresh/fresh-brew/main/Brewfile.local
curl --remote-name https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monfresh/fresh-brew/main/.node-version

# open the files in your text editor
open fresh-brew.local
open Brewfile.local
open .node-version

These files should be placed at the root of your project. fresh-brew.local is run at the end of the pour.sh script. Put your customizations there. If you want to install additional tools or Mac apps with Homebrew, add them to your Brewfile.local.

Write your customizations such that they can be run safely more than once. See the pour.sh script for examples. Any function defined in pour.sh can be used in your fresh-brew.local.

If you want to skip running fresh-brew.local, you can set the SKIP_LOCAL environment variable to true before running bash pour.sh:

export SKIP_LOCAL=true
bash pour.sh

In the example files above, nodenv and yarn will be installed globally via Homebrew, but then you can install different versions of node using nodenv, and you can switch between them by specifying the node version in a .node-version file at the root of your project. That way, you can have one project that uses Node version 14.7.1, and another that uses Node version 16.9.1. Each project should have its own fresh-brew.local file that installs the desired version using nodenv based on the one specified in .node-version.

Check the Node installation

To verify if Node was installed and configured:

node --version

You should see the desired version based on your .node-version file.

nodenv help

You should see various commands you can run with nodenv.