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Raman Butta
Raman Butta

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My initial settings on Mac

#tooling #node #beginners #tutorial

XCode Command Line Tools 

xcode-select --install
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Homebrew

Then go to homebrew's website and download the .pkg installer and install it. After that add it to your system path using this terminal command :

eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"
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Then check the installation by :

brew doctor
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It should say “Your system is ready to brew”
Homebrew lets you easily install the core development tools we'll need subsequently.

Use Homebrew to install the major tools needed:

Git

Git: Install version control (if you haven’t already):

brew install git
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(Homebrew’s Git will be in your PATH)

Node.js

Node.js and npm: Install the LTS Node (includes npm). You’ll need Node 18+ for modern Next.js:

brew update
brew install node
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This provides node and npm (npm v9+). You can check with node -v command. The version should be ≥ v20.9 for nextjs to work later.

Python

Note that Mac comes with a pre-installed system python (say 3.9.x) which you can check using:

which python3
python3 --version
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Never mess with the system python or try to upgrade it using say brew. Instead install an environment manager like conda to create separate python envs with your desired version (e.g. py3.10) for different categories of your projects.

Conda

For that go to the Miniconda website and download the GUI .pkg installer for your system. Install it. Check it using conda --version

VSCode

You can download the installer from the VSCode website. This is a .app file and not a .pkg file. So double-clicking it from your Downloads folder will directly open the application. But this behaves like a "temporary instance" and doesn't install permanently. So you must drag the Visual Studio Code.app → Finder sidebar → Applications.
This makes it a proper, permanent installation.
Then you need to generate an ssh key in your Mac and connect that to your Github account to access github repos from the vscode terminal. Refer to my tutorial here.

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