OS X Mavericks – From a clean install to working Ruby on Rails environment

Preparing for a clean installation

Although Apple provides a pretty nifty and reliable way of upgrading the operating system, I decided to do some Autumn cleaning, wipe my SSD and start anew.

Although I had the TimeMachine backup, I've stored all important stuff on an external USB disk, hence I won't be restoring from TimeMachine backup later on.

Installing OS X Mavericks

So in order to proceed with a clean install I bought an USB stick (8GB is enough) and used DiskMaker X to download and create a bootable USB disk.

I've created a new partition and formatted it as Journaled Case-sensitive.

The installation itself takes about 20 minutes (depended on SSD and USB drive/stick speed).

Post install – the good, the bad, the ugly?

After logging in all new and shiny Mavericks install the following:

• Xcode via App Store

• Xcode command line tools

  xcode-select --install

• Homebrew

  ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

• Check if Homebrew is working correctly. It might pop a warning if using case-sensitive file system.

  brew doctor

• Homebrew Cask

  brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask
  
  brew install brew-cask

• Enable TRIM support for non-Apple SSD (works for Samsung 830)

  sudo cp     /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage.original
  
  sudo perl -pi -e 's|(\x52\x6F\x74\x61\x74\x69\x6F\x6E\x61\x6C\x00{1,20})[^\x00]{9}(\x00{1,20}\x54)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg' /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage
  
  sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions/
  
  sudo reboot

• Alfred

  brew cask install alfred

  brew cask alfred link or manually add /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom as a Search Scope in Alfred's preferences

• oh-my-Zsh

  curl -L https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh | sh

• rbenv

  brew install rbenv ruby-build rbenv-gem-rehash
  
  echo 'eval "$(rbenv init - --no-rehash)"' >> ~/.zshrc

• Ruby 2.0

  rbenv install 2.0.0-p247
  
  rbenv global 2.0.0-p247
  
  gem update -—system
  
  gem install bundler

• iTerm2, tmux

  brew cask install iterm2
  
  brew install tmux reattach-to-user-namespace

• dotfiles

There is an excellent post about dotfiles management without using symlinks. It (perhaps) takes a bit more preparation and discipline in the beginning, but works perfectly on the long run.

mkdir ~/code/; git clone --bare git://github.com/tadejm/dotfiles.git ~/code/dotfiles.git

alias .G="git --git-dir=$HOME/code/dotfiles.git --work-tree=$HOME/"

echo 'alias .G="git --work-tree=$HOME/ --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles.git"'

• Rails

  gem install rails

Conclusion

Not sure if a clean install comes with a placebo effect. I doubt that an upgrade affects performance but I generally don't prefer it. Also a clean install gets rid of old–lying–around–files–from–15–months–ago.

The only argument, I could think of, against a clean install is the time spent for per-app configuration. I'm still looking for a way to share per app configuration like dotfiles in a Git repo.