Web Development on OS X
Lately I’ve come across quite a few articles written by people annoyed at the difficulties of web application development on OS X. I don’t want to flame anyone or say any one idea is better than another, but I would like to explain my setup.
- Make sure Macbook has 4Gigs of ram.
- Purchase VM Fusion or find a reasonable free alternative
- Create a Virtual Machine that copies as much of your actual production setup as possible. I happen to deploy on Ubuntu and CentOS. I do most of my development on the Ubuntu Server VM.
- I often have branches I have to support. These VM’s let me load up a system identical to that branch.
- You can probably get by with giving these VM’s 256 meg of ram and 10 gigs of space. Also, you don’t have to have multiple running at a time. So system resources most likely won’t be an issue to most of the readers.
- Take advantage of cloning and snapshot features of the VM. This really should be a part of every developers toolkit.
- You can mount the directories on the VM of you want to use OS X tools such as TextMate for editing. I used to do this, but eventually caved into to using Vi as I am SSHing into different servers all day.
Every one has a different situation. I wish I used this setup earlier in my career. With this you can still have the look and feel you love about OS X while not giving up an environment that resembles your production server.
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I’m not sure why people would consider it hard to do web dev on OS X (especially as opposed to a PC). I’m a strong believer in developing in a production-ish environment. In this way, you get the best chance of seamless deployments.
I run a 27″ iMac with 1TB drive, 8GB ram, 27″ secondary display, Parallels Desktop, and CentOS (because we deploy to RHEL).
The same process to setup a production server is followed on Parallels, in effect, creating a local server that I can develop on. I have a number of tools at my fingertips to connect OSX and Centos for opening files, but I keep gravitating back to good old vim-via-terminal (strange?)
I also use Parallels to run Windows and do IE/FireFox/Chrome testing there.
Using git for version control, I’m set. The only downside was my windows license for Navicat didn’t work on Mac, so I need to re-purchase.