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set-up-macos.md

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In this article I set up a Macintosh computer for web development.
If there something is not working, please let me know.

Recommendation

Choose a Mac with a minimum of 16 GB RAM and 1 TB disk space. I'm on a MacBook Air M1 (so called Apple silicon) with macOS Ventura. As keyboard layout I recommend an ANSI US layout.

Set Up

In this part I start from srcatch with a new Mac (or an clean installation of macOS)

  • Unbox your Mac and plug it into the power source
  • Press the power button and hold it down till your Mac says, that you can leave the button
  • Choose Options
  • Choose Disk Utility

Disk Partitions

By default your Mac comes with one big APFS partition for the whole system.
That's good for the performance of macOS, but not so well for development. So you need two partitions in total. The problem for development is, that the default APFS partition is case-insensitive.
What means that?
Imagine you have a directory (folder) called Coding. In this directory exists a file my-documentation.md. Fine, but if you try to create a second file named My-documentation.md your Mac don't creates it because it says 'Hey, I have allready a file called my-documentation.md'. So my-documentation.md and My-documentation.md is the same file for your Mac. That's what case-insensitivity is.

In web development you work with a lot of Linux computers (servers, machines of colliques) and you maybe create some web applications that have a interface to change things by users. There comes the problem. Linux is case-sensitive. So my-documentation.md is a completely other file than My-documentation.md.

First Partition

On Mac, I've 250 GB of disk space. So I use 100 GB for the system and the rest for my user. Here runs macOS. Choose the disk Macintosh HD and give it 200 GB of space, so it has enough space to breathe for all your apps and system stuff.
Select APFS. Now worries, it will be encrypted later.

Second Partition

Here is the place for all your stuff. Create a partition and name it Users. That's important because with this name your apps don't will run into problems. Give it the space of all the rest of your disk and select APFS (case-sensitive).
You are ready to go! Press Apply.

  • Close Disk Utility
  • Run macOS
  • Open Finder > Settings > Sidebar > Mark Hard disks
  • Copy all directories in Macintosh HD/Users to your second partition into Users
  • Open System Settings > Users & Groups > Right click on your user > Advanced Options > Set Home directory to /Volumes/Users/yourUserName

Your home directory is now setted on the case-sensitive partition so you can start with your development projects.. to be continued...

WIP documentation

Install Nerd-Font:

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts &&
brew install --cask font-space-mono-nerd-font