How to set up a basic dev environment for web development (mac OSX / Linux)

This is a tutorial for beginners on how to set up a dev environment on a Mac/OSX (applicable to Linux as well).

Text Editor - Sublime Text

You’ll probably want at least a text editor like Sublime Text. Install it, and then set up a subl keyword that you can use to launch Sublime from the terminal (eg. subl . or subl filename.txt)

sudo ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl

Next, install the package manager for Sublime.

Then you’ll want to install a nice dark theme.

Terminal - iTerm, Oh My Zsh

Download iTerm2. It’s much better than Mac OSX’s default terminal.

Fire it up and install Oh My Zsh via the following command:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

This will make your terminal look prettier and give you some pretty sweet features like telling you what git branch you’re on.

git

You should set up some aliases to save you some keystrokes. The following let’s you type git co <branchname> instead of git checkout <branchname>:

git config --global alias.co checkout

Here’s a video demonstration of this: