How I setup a new development Mac in less than an hour

Jonathan Fielding
3 min readMar 14, 2023
Photo by Dmitry Chernyshov on Unsplash

Recently I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro and went through the process of setting up my development environment. As most developers will appreciate, this can be a long experience as you often have to visit the websites for each of your tools, find the correct version and then download this. If, like me, you use a lot of tools; then this can result in this taking a long time.

Fortunately, though, I learnt a few years back of a much more optimum way of setting up my machine, so today I thought I would share the tools I use to optimise my systems setup.

The first thing I always install when setting up a new Mac is to install Homebrew, Homebrew is a package manager for the Mac that can be used to install both system packages (for example, wget and node.js) and applications.

As its a command line tool it is also installed using the command line so I fire up Terminal and run:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

With Homebrew installed, the next thing I do when setting up my laptop is to install my applications. I achieve this by running the brew install --cask command followed by a list of the applications I wish to install, an example of which can be seen below:

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Jonathan Fielding
Jonathan Fielding

Written by Jonathan Fielding

Staff Engineer working for @Spendesk, speaker about web things, writing about tech, contributor to open source. If you like what I write make sure to follow.

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