How to migrate a Homebrew environment to another computer? - homebrew

What is the preferred method of exporting a homebrew environment so I can synchronize my workspace between computers? Seems like there should be something similar to composer.lock or pip freeze. Is there a better way than brew list > brews.txt?

There is a better way: brew leaves.
This command prints a simple list of installed formulae which are not dependencies of any other formulae. Essentially this lists everything that was manually installed or is a leftover dependency from a removed formula.
$ brew leaves
apple-gcc42
bash-completion
brew-cask
git
[...]
There's no built-in means of using brew leaves output to install, but just having a clean list of manually-installed formulae is a step in the right direction.
Thanks to this Gabe Berke-Williams for writing about this: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/brew-leaves

Homebrew Bundle seems like a pretty great solution.

There is not a better way, and there are no current plans to make one.
Source: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/17771

Use git! Maintaining repos for environment setup scripts is a pretty slick approach.
I highly recommend using a script to set up a development environment in the first place. thoughtbot has a really lightweight approach that provisions a development environment, including a bunch of brew formulas. https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop. GitHub just open sourced boxen for this (and much more), but it has a somewhat steeper learning curve.
As you can see from the thoughtbot/latop readme, the entire install is a one-liner. If you want different packages, fork the repo and add whatever you use. This only covers the initial install, but it is a fantastic start.
For ongoing synchronization of development environments, including updating your preferred homebrew setup, you might want to try a 'dotfiles' approach. Zach Holman has a great approach detailed here: https://github.com/holman/dotfiles
If you want to tweak or update anything, just make the appropriate changes to the script (holman's dot script does the ongoing update stuff). Commit, push, pull down from any other environments.

Related

How does Nix able to install individual NPM packages as standalone software?

CAVEAT: If you would like to use Serverless Framework with Nix/NixOS, this is not the way to do it: the package you end up with is outdated, and (as stated below) it probably won't work anyway. See thread on NixOS Discourse.
Wanted to try out Serverless via nix-shell so I looked it up, ran the command
nix-shell -v -p nodePackages.serverless
a̶n̶d̶ i̶t̶ w̶o̶r̶k̶s̶ f̶l̶a̶w̶l̶e̶s̶s̶l̶y̶.1
What makes this possible without requiring me to install Node manually to be able to run npm install -g serverless? (E.g., Is the node_modules folder somewhere in the Nix store? What happens if I nix-shell another Node package - will they share that same directory?)
[1]: It does not... See this Reddit thread; probable setuid issue. Still interested in the behind the scene stuff though.
This question is more like a todo because I really would like to figure it out myself but don't have the time for it right now...
This is possible because it was packaged with node2nix. This tool generates expressions that fetch the various packages and put them in a node_modules directory.
Indeed it's not perfect and some package need some extra fixing up to make them work well. The node2nix tooling could 'learn' from the cabal2nix integration in Nixpkgs to improve the quality of packaging and the Nixpkgs developer experience.

Made an edit to homebrew formula, now I want to save it

So I've made an edit to the tmux formula in homebrew, but now I'm starting to think about how I can keep that change between machines without forking and maintaining my own version of homebrew.
If I do fork homebrew, I would just have to edit and install script to point to my location, but would the formulas locations still be maintained?
So I guess my question is what are my options here? Should I fork homebrew or just make a note of the changes?
You can make your own tap. The easiest way is to create a repository on GitHub called homebrew-self. Your custom formula goes in the root of the repository. Then, you can use it in Homebrew by running
brew tap <your github username>
If you're modifying a formula that's already in Homebrew, though, the easiest (and best) way is to submit a pull request containing your changes.

Do I Really need to install homebrew to install rails and why?

I hope this question is suitable for this forum, I'm still learning what's deemed fit and what isn't. Anyway here is my question, a lot of places seem to state I need to install homebrew on my mac to install rails, do I really need to and what benefits does it offer to do so and for the development environment?
This question is pretty bad but I remember when I started programming that I had a similar question, so here we go:
How do you install stuff on your computer? Obviously you use the Mac App Store if you want something from Apple, and if you want to install Chrome just go the Google Chrome website etc.
But when you want some kind of programmer tool, let's say a compiler. How do you install this? Either you go to their website, download a tarball with the source code, compile it from scratch and bind the necessary environment variables. Or you are unlucky and the compiler has a bunch of dependencies so you have to download them first.
Then some geniuses thought that "Oh damn, that's a pain", so instead they created so called package managers, so now when I want Rails on my computer, I just installed it through the "gem" ruby package/dependency manager.
So you can install rails through the command "gem" (just google "ruby gem") and you'll see what it is, but I advise you to if you want to have a nice development environment where it's easy to install and uninstall stuff, use brew or macports.

New to vim - MAC OSX Mountain Lion

I am new to vim, and I just followed this setup tutorial, but something went wrong. I am a ruby developer and I am not getting a a ruby highlighting syntax. I have installed janus, before with pathogen I had syntax highlighting but not know.
Also I am using the solarized theme the guy suggested but there is no difference now (in color) between folders and files in my terminal when listing a directory.
Could somebody tell me if I can install pathogen with janus? WIll this break my vim?
Thanks!
Don't install anything (and don't install Janus).
Run $ vimtutor in your terminal. As many times as needed (and don't install Janus).
Once you feel ready to use Vim for day-to-day coding, install MacVim which is built with a better feature set than the default Vim. It comes with a CLI executable so you can use it in your terminal and in tmux (and don't install Janus).
Install the vim-ruby package for better, more up-to-date Ruby support (and don't install Janus).
Don't install Janus. This thing is a pile of crap that will make your life overly complicated, hook you on plugins that may or may not be the best for you needs and prevent you from actually learning Vim properly in exchange of an artificially flattened learning curve.
Decide for a plugin/runtimepath management solution (VAM, vundle or plain Pathogen) and choose your plugins yourself according to your needs (and don't install Janus).
If you have problems with Solarized, take a look at their issue tracker and their wiki. It is fragile and you need some work to set it up correctly (and… you know the rest).

Looking for SVN Best Practices When Building Rails Applications on Ubuntu [closed]

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First a bit of background.
I have been working on the MS platform for my entire development career. Up until 2 weeks ago, I had never booted any other OS than 98/XP/Vista. I started using VSS long long ago, and made the change to SVN about 2 years ago. With SVN I use TortiseSVN and use the standard branch/tag/trunk setup.
My projects are also self contained, meaning I can go to a fresh dev box, pull down a single repository, open VS, press F5 and it will run (most of the time). All dependencies are stored in a lib folder, source code is in a src folder, etc...
In an effort to learn new things, I've decided to build a Ruby on Rails application and have created a Ubuntu based development machine. I have a SVN server up and running and am working with another person on this project. He happens to be using a Mac for his development machine.
And now for the issues.
I seem to be struggling with how to manage the various versions of ruby, rails and all of the plugin's I'm working with. I also seem to be struggling with using SVN on Ubuntu.
So Ubuntu comes with Ruby pre-installed. I want to say it's version 1.8.5. Either way, I had a bunch of gems to install for the plugin I'm using (Community Engine). Being new to *nix, I didn't use sudo when installing them and ran into all sorts of issues. I ended up blowing away Ruby completely and starting fresh. That seemed to work.
The problem is though, that after I commit my code, and the other guy gets latest, he has to go through the whole process of installing gems.
What is the best practice for managing gems and plug-ins in a RoR application? I don't care if a zillion files get added to SVN. Diskspace and network bandwidth are cheap. I just don't know how to do this correctly.
So on to SVN.
I have installed RapidSVN, but very frequently run into issues with folders getting locked. A couple times I realized my mistake, others, I had no clue why. But in both scenarios, i couldn't fix it. I ended up making a backup of my code, pulling down a new working copy, then manually moving over changes and being a bit smarter when committing them to the project.
I actually RTFM a bit last night and found that I'm supposed to create a bookmark for my repos, then do a "checkout working copy" from that bookmark. I'm not sure why, but ok, that's what the manual says...
What are some best practices for using SVN on a RoR project on Ubuntu?
I'm literally looking for a step by step process on this one.
edit
I forgot to mention, I use NetBeans for my IDE, although i have not looked to see what kind of SVN support it has, if any. I looked at RubyMine, and would love to use it, but it appears to be too unstable right now.
For plugins, I'd personally recommend just sticking them in the vendor folder and add them to SVN as if you'd written the code yourself. Piston was also a great solution, but switched away from it when all the common plugins started moving to github (piston has been unreliable since then)
For gems, hopefully you're using rails 2 or higher. You should be listing the gems you require in your config/environment.rb using config.gem. Here's a bunch of information about that feature
What this means is that if you add a new gem, the next time your co-worker updates, his rails app won't boot until he's got the neccessary gems. He can then install them in one step using sudo rake gems:install
You can take this one step further, and put your gems in the vendor directory. This is commonly known as "vendor everything." The easiest way to do this is to list all the gems you use in environment.rb as above, and then run rake gems:unpack. There are 2 problems with this approach however, so I prefer not to use it myself.
If you have 10 apps and they each vendor their gems, you end up keeping 10 copies of common gems in subversion, which makes updating all your sites a whole lot slower.
This may not be an issue for you, or may be worth putting up with, it's just a personal preference.
Some gems (such as mongrel or hpricot) have native extensions written in C. What this means is that when you install them, the .c source code is downloaded, and gcc gets run to compile it specifically for your system.
If you installed a native C extension on ubuntu, then put it in the vendor folder, and later on tried to run that on OS X (or even possibly a different version of ubuntu) it would most likely crash your ruby process and bring your app down.
If all your gems are pure-ruby ones, then this is not a problem, but it's just something to be aware of.
Many people use piston or desert to manage plugins and install gems into Rail local vendor folder (stored under SVN).
http://www.rubyinside.com/advent2006/12-piston.html
http://pivotallabs.com/users/brian/blog/articles/459-build-your-own-rails-plugin-platform-with-desert
I also recommend using geminstaller which will help you both install all the same gems and the same versions of them
http://geminstaller.rubyforge.org/
I use SVN from the command line but if you were more comfortable with TortiseSVN you might want to try IDEs that have SVN nicely integrated like RadRails and NetBeans. The IDEs have very similar graphical SVN managers similar to Tortise, if you want to work on the cmd line just find a simple 10 minute SVN tutorial and you should be good to go.
I have never heard of rapid SVN and the normal SVN tool has always worked just find with me, hardly ever causing the locking folders issue.
Orion mentioned having to rebuild gems that have been vendored when sharing them between different OS's - you can use the gems:build rake task to rebuild them automatically.
First, figure out svn from the command line. The svn-book is on line. It's not too hard to do svn status or svn commit -m "blah". Most problems come if you use OS functions to delete or rename files. Use the svn commands for that.
Next, if rapidsvn is not working out for you, try svn-workbench. Hate to say it, but none of the linux svn GUI tools that I have seen are as good as tortoisesvn.
Plugins and svn are an issue. There is a tool called piston that aims to clear that up, though I don't use it. I check out the plugins into my vendor/plugins directory. If a new version comes out that I really want, I use my trusty update_plugin bash script to update the plugin:
#!/bin/bash
# reinstall the plugin in an svn friendly way
plugin="some_plugin"
plugin_url="http://some_server/some_plugin/trunk"
for f in site1 site2 site3
do
echo $f
cd ~/rails/$f
svn delete vendor/plugins/$plugin
rm -rf vendor/plugins/$plugin
svn -m "remove $plugin" commit
script/plugin install $plugin_url
svn add vendor/plugins/$plugin
svn -m "add $plugin" commit
done

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