Welcome to DHIL’s Developer Documentation
Introduction
This guide assumes you are setting up a development environment for use in the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab on a Mac. There are many comparable systems for using Windows or Linux, but we don’t have any users on those systems to test out the documentation. If you’d like to use those systems and write documentation on your experiences, please do.
Contributions via our Github are always welcome.
Conventions
File paths are typeset in a monotype font in running text to
distinguish them from the surrounding content.
Terminal commands may be referred to inline like cat /path/to/file for
a simple description. Longer commands or commands with output are
typeset as in the next example.
$ ruby --version
ruby 2.0.0p648 (2015-12-16 revision 53162) [universal.x86_64-darwin15]
Line 1 above has the command that should be typed, prefixed by a dollar sign. Don’t type the dollar sign as part of the command.
Line 2 has the output from the command. It isn’t prefixed with a dollar sign to indicate that it is output.
Warnings, notes, and other important information will be included in notes like this one.
Some parts of the documentation are not as complete or edited as they should be. Those parts have been noted in these todo blocks.
Command line
Many of the tools used in this guide are installed, configured, and run from the command line. You should have a basic familiarity with the running commands from the terminal.
There are plenty of resources on the Internet to help a person learn to use the command line and the terminal.
- http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/introduction-to-the-mac-os-x-command-line
- https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/command-line-basics-and-useful-tricks-with-the-terminal--cms-29356
OS X includes a usable terminal/command line program at
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. It’s good enough for most
purposes. If you’d like to use something more sophisticated,
iTerm2 is a very powerful replacement.
Tools
All the tools described by this guide have a common dependency. They will not work without Apple’s XCode tools installed. You don’t need the full, complete XCode suite, just the command line tools. Like everything else, there’s a command to do that.
$ xcode-select --install
XCode is a big piece of software. Expect it to take a long time to download.
Why is xcode needed to run all the tools? Is this something that could be explained or linked out to another resource? Is it important or necessary to update xcode based on which version of OSX you are running? If it is important, I found instruction on how to update xcode command line tools here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34617452/how-to-update-xcode-from-command-line. –Erik