Setup a Mac Dev Machine From Scratch

Though Terminal comes out of the box, I prefer to use iTerm and Oh-My-Zsh. Even for the command-line, visuals matter!

Let's pull in Sublime Text in this episode. However, I'm not the biggest fan of the stock install, in terms of visuals. Instead, we'll pull in the excellent Material theme. We'll also pull in a few monospaced fonts that you might like, including Roboto Mono, Fira Code, and Source Code Pro.

To dig more heavily into Sublime Text configuration, check out the dedicated series here at Laracasts.

It may sound foolish, but it's true that I do use two editors in my day-to-day workflow. I find that PHPStorm particularly provides some useful refactoring and analysis capabilities, as opposed to a tool like Sublime Text. In this episode, we'll install it and begin configuring and improving the visuals.

Fortunately, Node is one of the more simple tools in our ecosystem to install. Just a few clicks will set us up. We'll also take a few moments to pull in Yarn, which provides some significant performance and security improvements over NPM.

Though every new Mac comes with PHP pre-installed, it's almost always out of date. My new machine ships with PHP 5.6! We're at 7.1 now, so let's install Homebrew to pull in the latest version, as well as MariaDB (a replacement for MySQL).

Every respectable PHP developer must have Composer installed. It's the defacto dependency manager for the language, and is leveraged by nearly all modern frameworks and libraries.

In this episode, we'll install PHPUnit globally, and figure out a clean workflow for triggering it in Sublime Text. Though a number of packages are available, I happen to prefer the simple Sublime-PHPUnit option, which can be installed through GitHub.

I'm fairly certain that I'm the only one who does this, but hear me out: I remap Caps Lock to Shift. Yes, not Control or Escape; I said Shift. In this episode, I'll explain why, while demonstrating how to go about performing such a remapping (with Karabiner Elements).

Though Git allows you to define any number of aliases, they're still too long to write in this author's opinion. Instead, let's create a dedicated file on our machine for aliases, and build up a handful of Git-specific ones.

In the past, I've reached for VirtualBox and Vagrant to setup my development environment. However, these days, for most projects in our space, Laravel Valet is a far more simple and light-weight alternative. I love every spec of it, and you will too!

There are a number of MySQL GUIs for the Mac, but I've only ever used Sequel Pro. When you're that satisfied with a tool or product, why bother looking for something else? It won't be as good.