Installing an A2 Development Environment

This tutorial will explain how to set up your Apostrophe 2 development environment on a Mac with any recent version of OS X. It lists all technical dependencies and is appropriate for developers without previous experience with the command line or node.js.

We'll be installing the following tools:

• Xcode for the various utilities that come with it
• Homebrew for easy download and installation of software packages
• git for version control
• node and npm for running the server and managing node packages
• mongo for the database
• imagemagick for command-line image resizing and cropping

These are the technical requirements for Apostrophe 2. In addition a nice code editor like Sublime Text goes a long way, as does a Terminal extension like TotalTerminal or iTerm.

Install Xcode

Xcode can be installed from the App store. We recommend installing Xcode Command Line Tools as well, which is available in Xcode -> Preferences ... -> Downloads.

Install Homebrew

Open up a new Terminal window and run this command:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go/install)"

Now you have homebrew, which can be accessed using the brew command in Terminal.

Git

brew install git

Install Node & NPM

brew install node

We'll need to add node's directory to our $PATH in order for it to work its magic. Create a bash profile if you don't have one already, and then open it in TextEdit: touch ~/.profile && open ~/.profile

In this new file, add these two lines:

export NODE_PATH="/usr/local/lib/node"
export PATH="/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH”

You should verify that this worked by opening a new Terminal tab and running: echo $PATH

It should echo the path that you added as a set of colon-separated values.

NPM should have been installed with Node, but we'll check to make sure. Try: npm

and if you get a 'not found' kind of error, run this: curl https://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Mongo

brew install mongo

During the mongo install, it will print out instructions for starting mongo on login (recommended for developers), which should look like this:

==> Caveats
To have launchd start mongodb at login:
    ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/mongodb/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
Then to load mongodb now:
    launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist
Or, if you don't want/need launchctl, you can just run:
    mongod

Run those, open a new tab and try: mongo

It should start an interactive mongo prompt. ctrl+c to exit.

ImageMagick

brew install imagemagick

That's everything you need to get started. The next tutorial covers starting a new Apostrophe 2 project.