Everything I Want for a Developer’s Environment
After 5 years (2016-2021) of wrong doings such as the useless touch bar, troublesome keybord design, among many others, Apple has finally come back to have a decent Macbook Pro model, along with its amazing M1 chip.
So here I’m back, too. ;)
This article is a simple documentation + murmurs on what I need (want?) to setup my dev environment on a new machine. They are actually more or less OS-agnostic, but this time due to the changing architecture to ARM, some research has to be done to make sure everything is running as expected.
Homebrew seems to be the only one I need for macOS package management.
MacOS now ships with zsh by default. Personally I feel oh-my-zsh is just good enough for me out-of-the-box.
MacOS’s default Terminal.app has quietly evolved a lot during the past decade. I used to prefer iTerm2 but now I think I only need Terminal.app. The only thing I need is to make it colorful.
Once being a Vim enthusiastic, now I rely more on VS Code for my day-to-day coding and writing. It is actually because I need a cross-platform editor to reduce as much as possible the friction while I need to switch between different machines. I used to work in an environment where only Windows is available. (And, of course, you don’t have the admin right.) Using Vim on Windows is just not pleasant. And that’s where I met VS Code, and gradually start to enjoy it.
I think nowadays it is just one of the most popular and also very useful IDE. Well I still use Vim, but just not as much as I used to.
Some must-have extensions for me:
The must-have Python versioning and virtualenv framework. I’ve been using it for years and never switch to any other alternatives.
One caveat: if I am on a Windows machine, I may need to fallback to
conda since the pyenv experience on Windows is
not that pleasant. Well I usually just use WSL to bypass all the hassles
I may have if I were to work on a Windows machine. But that is not
always feasible, say, if you are working for a bank.
A very nice console to just replace the default one.
I feel that I shall mention RStudio as well. It is the go-to IDE for R with no realistic competitors for a decade. But I’m relying on it less and less in the recent years even while I focus on analytical works. I think it has something to do with RStudio’s ambition to be more than it needs to be. The IDE is just feeding too many features to me that I don’t need. I’d rather have a simple REPL with a nicely colored console and auto completion to get the job done.
Yep. I’m also never a fan of the .Rproj thing.
Now if I need interactive coding in R, I’ll just use VS Code with
radian as its terminal.
I still use RStudio, but very specifically for editing complicated
Rmarkdown files only. To me RStudio is now just a dedicated
Rmarkdown IDE. I may eventually use VS Code extentions to
replace it anyway.
A nice package versioning tool that I found I should use it as much as I can.
There is no Python virtualenv counterpart in the R
world. Partly because it is not urgently needed. But still, if you use R
extensively enough you are going to bump into the version management
trouble. Tool such as renv handles only package version and
not R itself. But it is a very good start.
I’m not a Java guy at all. But we will need from time to time the Java runtime for quite some applications. And sometimes JRE is not enough so why not just install JDK once and for all.
brew install openjdk
sudo ln -sfn /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdkI may need to figure out the best way to install local Spark instance with M1 since the newest Spark still relies on a relatively older version of Java. Ideally I want the M1 machine to run on only the newest Java which does not require a Rosetta layer.
I may come up with another post on doing this if I managed to have a
way out. Hopefully not jEnv. :)
An increasingly debatable choice of containerization. No doubt it is still the most popular tool in the market. Personally I found it may not be too difficult to switch to another container tech, since they are all trying to follow the existing workflow (notably, OCI) that has been originally established by Docker’s dev community, so that users can seamlessly adopt them.
A light-weight VM managmenet command line tool specific to Ubuntu. Since I usually only need Ubuntu when it comes to virtualization (with one exception coming latter), so this is handy.
VirtualBox is out. It doesn’t support ARM.
That brings us UTM to the attention. UTM can do both virualization and emulation. the latter is required when your host OS has a different architecture than the guest OS. This can be the case especially when we have a Macbook Pro with M1 chip, which is ARM architecture.
While emulation is going to have overhead since there is additional layers of translation. I’m using UTM only to install Kali Linux, which supports ARM architecture.
One thing to note is that after installation it won’t boot but will
stuck at the UEFI shell. This is found on
QEMU 6.2 ARM Virtual Machine with
kali-linux-2022.1 image.
A solution has been discussed in this thread. In
short, we need to cd to fs0 in the UEFI shell (by typing
fs0: and hit enter) and create/edit a file called
startup.nsh (we can use edit <filename>
to open a built-in editor). Insert the following line in the file:
fs0:\efi\kali\grubaa64.efiand reboot.
Now to enable clipboard and directory sharing we need to install the following additional packages in Kali:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install spice-vdagent spice-webdavdA useful and widely adopted infrastructure-as-code framework. I’ve been working extensively in the past 1 year with Terraform to manage data infra stack in AWS.
brew install terraformA very interesting project to deploy AWS components locally (in just one container!) for testing purpose. Though it seems that it is running much slower on M1 than on the previous x86_64 Macbook.
Local Kubernetes playground.
brew install minikubeA very useful AWS credential management tool, especially convenient when you have multiple accounts or multiple IAM roles to assume in your workflow.
brew install --cask aws-vaultA handy command line json parser. Very useful when we need to frequently deal with json lines.
brew install jqThis will be required for some plotting utilities (such as PlantUML).
brew install graphvizThe core dependency for Rmarkdown.
brew install pandocIf you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.