So you bought your shiny new mac and want to code? There are few things you need to install and configure. I use mostly my mac for PHP development and I need some software to be installed to start to code. Let’s start with a list of essential things you need.

1. Homebrew — The missing package manager for OS X
2. Github — GitHub is a service that provides git repositories. Github Desktop is the software we are going to use for managing the essential version control system: git.
3. An IDE you choose. (I used mostly TextMate but I am using Visual Studio Code-yes it’s from Microsoft and it’s beautiful-)

Let’s install Homebrew first. You are going to need brew to install most of the tools you need, easily on command line. Open a fresh terminal and enter this command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

It can ask your password for your permission so enter your password. Can take some time, because it’s going to install Xcode command line tools.

If everything goes well you should see something like this on terminal:

Side note: Thanks to Jean-Michel Fayard all of the next installations can be done using Homebrew-cask. So if you like using terminal, like me you can do all of the installations using those commands. Cask is an addition to install GUI apps on your mac. Let’s install cask first.

$ brew tap caskroom/cask
$ brew cask install github-desktop
$ brew cask install visual-studio-code

So you can install all of the GUI apps using brew cask on your mac. You can check cask here for more details: https://caskroom.github.io/

Github can be installed with brew. But I prefer to install Github for Desktop because it does most of the configuration by itself. If you don’t have a Github account, sign up and create one and go to https://desktop.github.com/ and click to download link.

Extract the downloaded file and drag the app to your applications folder. Most of the time when you download an app from internet, your mac will popup this:

Just click open, and open the Github desktop app. It will greet you with a welcome message.

Click continue.

Enter your login credentials from github.com. And click to sign in button.

If everything goes well you should see your name. Click continue.

On next page click to install command line tools, it will ask you for password. If you saw “Installation Complete” message like above, click continue again.

Hence you don’t have any repos on your local machine, click done.

You installed Github for desktop, a tutorial repo will appear. You can close the app for now.

Let’s intall Visual Studio Code. Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/download and click to download button.

Same as Github just drag the downloaded app from Downloads folder to your Applications folder.

When you click, annoying pop up will appear again, click open, and you have to see Visual Studio Code.

I prefer to keep my cloned repositories and my projects in ~/src folder. So you can do the same. Open a terminal and enter this commands:

$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src

Let’s try to clone an example app to our src folder. Here is my educational PHP repository from Github. https://github.com/midorikocak/prezis Go to that page and click to “Clone or Download” button:

Copy the line starting with “git@github.com”. In the terminal you opened go to your src folder you created before. So enter these commands:

$ cd ~/src
$ git clone git@github.com:midorikocak/prezis.git

You should see something similar to this after pressing enter:

$ cd ~/src
$ git clone git@github.com:midorikocak/prezis.git

Cloning into 'prezis'...
Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address '192.30.253.112' to the list of known hosts.
remote: Counting objects: 143, done.
remote: Total 143 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 143
Receiving objects: 100% (143/143), 183.17 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (63/63), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
$

Congratulations you cloned (downloaded) your first repository. You should have a folder called “prezis” in your src folder. I going to explain what is Git and what is the purpose in another tutorial.

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First basic steps are ok. Let’s go forward with essentials we need for PHP development. A fresh Mac OS X with El Capitan, comes with already installed PHP 5.5.36.Open a fresh terminal and type “php -v” if you see something like that you have your PHP env installed.

$ php -v
PHP 5.5.36 (cli) (built: May 29 2016 01:07:06)
Copyright (c) 1997-2015 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2015 Zend Technologies

PHP 5.5.36 is ok, but I prefer bleeding edge features of PHP 7+. But we will enter to the update process in another tutorial.

The essentials for PHP developments are Composer, Apache and MySQL. The Apache Web Server is already installed on Mac OS X but it needs to be enabled and configured. First start with installing Composer. Normally you can follow instructions at https://getcomposer.org/download/ but it is easier to install using Homebrew we installed before. So open a fresh terminal and type this command.

$ brew install homebrew/php/composer

It will take some time and many many messages will flood. After installation is complete, you can check you composer installation using command “composer” type and press enter, you should see something like this:

$ composer
   ______
  / ____/___  ____ ___  ____  ____  ________  _____
 / /   / __ / __ `__ / __ / __ / ___/ _ / ___/
/ /___/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ / /_/ (__  )  __/ /
____/____/_/ /_/ /_/ .___/____/____/___/_/

Composer version 1.2.0 2016-07-19 01:28:52

Usage:
command [options] [arguments]

If you installed composer successfully, go to your ~/src/prezis folder, the repository you downloaded before. Enter “composer install” comand and press enter. This command will download repository dependencies to a subfolder called “vendor”

$ ~/src/prezis
$ composer install

Congratulations, you are done with installing essentials for PHP on your mac.

For apache and mysql installation you can follow the tutorial here: https://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/get-apache-mysql-php-and-phpmyadmin-working-on-osx-10-11-el-capitan/