Some time ago I had to compile some libraries for a project I’m working on and that made me realize my machine was all messed up.
It had ruby and mysql manually compiled into /usr/local, imagemagick installed via a package, postgres installed via macports (arghh) and some other stuff that I don’t even recall compiled via different install scripts. I was also trapped to a single ruby version.
One may say it’s not a big deal but to a control freak like me, that’s more of a mess than I can leave with.
I guess my lack of familiarity with a Mac took me to that point and I finally decided to put some effort on rebuilding my environment.
I’m not the step-by-step kind of guy, so I’ll just present the tools that I now rely on and made the difference to me.
Homebrew is a recipe based package installer that’s becoming very popular. It’s great and the formula library is growing fast. It beautifully organizes everything into /usr/local and have a great symlinks approach. Very easy to install and uninstall stuff. Some basic dependency resolution is also present. It quickly gave me wget, mysql, postgres and imagemagick. Take a look on the list of recipes.
RVM or Ruby Version Manager is a sweet gem which allows you to have multiple versions of Ruby installed in the same machine and easily switch among them. Gem sets is a cool feature it offers which allows you to jail that app which purpose seems to be using all the gems out there.
One more cool side effect of using Homebrew and RVM is that I no longer need to use sudo all the time.
Hope it works well for other people like it’s working for me.
Cheers!
