Install more developer tools

MacOS comes with the Ruby scripting language—but it’s usually out-of-date and quite restricted. So we need to install our own version, which isn’t too difficult to install, but it does require everything to be completed from within Terminal.

So first: open “Terminal” on your computer. It’s in Applications > Utilities or you can search with “Spotlight”.

Yours will look different: I have mine super customized.

You will not be able to get to the next line in the Terminal like mine shows—mine is extremely customized because I use it so often.

Homebrew is a package manager for Mac & Terminal—it’s like an app store, but specifically in the Terminal and mostly for developer tools.

First go to the Homebrew website.

On the page, you’ll see a chunk of code—copy it.

Paste it into your Terminal and hit return, your computer will go off an install Homebrew.

It will prompt you for your computer’s password. As you type it in you won’t see anything—but it is being entered. When you’ve finished typing your password, hit Return.

Later in the term we’ll be using an application framework called Jekyll. Jekyll is written in the Ruby programming language, so we need to get that installed on our systems.

Using brew we can install the most recent version of Ruby.

All computers have a hidden piece of information called the $PATH variable; it’s most used when interacting with the Terminal.

The $PATH variable tells Terminal what folders to look for applications in—and more importantly what order of folders to look.

After installing a different version of Ruby than the one installed in our system, we want to tell MacOS to prioritize looking in the newest Ruby, not the original one.

Copy the above code and paste it into your Terminal window. Hit Return. (You should be able to see this code a few lines up in the display, that’s Ruby also telling you to do this.)

We need to get the Terminal to reinitialize itself—so close the window and create a new window: ⌘W, ⌘T

Just to confirm that Ruby is installed, we’re actually going to look for another app that was installed alongside Ruby: RubyGems. We’re going to look to see which RubyGems app your computer tries to load.

You should see exactly this output: /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/gem otherwise it didn’t install properly. It’s likely that your $PATH variable wasn’t set properly—your teacher can help you fix that.