preparing-your-system.md

Preparing an existing system

The easiest way to make sure your system accepts the development environment is to prepare a clean slate.

Before you follow any of these instructions, understand what they are doing. They will remove things from your system. If there is anything that you want to record about the state of your system (e.g. a list of installed Homebrew packages or Ruby gems), do this now.

Move aside conflicting dotfiles

Some shared dotfiles will be installed. Move yours aside to let these come into place.

shared_dotfiles=(aliases gemrc gitconfig gitignore gitmessage psqlrc rcrc rspec zsh zshenv zshrc)

for dotfile in ${shared_dotfiles[*]}; do
  if [ -e ~/.${dotfile} ]; then
    echo "Moving ~/.$dotfile to ~/.$dotfile.pre-icelab-babushka-deps"
    mv ~/.${dotfile} ~/.${dotfile}.pre-icelab-babushka-deps
  fi
done

Once the development environment is installed, you can learn how to extend, customize or even replace these dotfiles.

You should do at least one other thing before installing the new environment: create a ~/.gitconfig.local file with your personal name and email address for git commits, e.g.

[user]
  name = Your Name
  email = [email protected]

This file will get automatically picked up and used by the new dotfiles that are installed.

Uninstall rbenv and nodenv

These version managers are installed into your home directory. Remove any you might already have in place.

rm -rf ~/.rbenv
rm -rf ~/.nodenv

If you are using other version managers, like chruby, rvm or nvm, you should remove them too.

Uninstall homebrew

(These uninstall instructions are based on mxcl's gist)

Before you try and remove Homebrew, make sure you have it's already installed already:

brew --prefix

If this doesn't return a path, you don't need to do anything else. If it does, carry on with these instructions. You can paste them line-by-line into your terminal. They'll remove all the Homebrew-related files from your system (typically from /usr/local), and leave anything else in place.

After you've done this, it might be a good time to poke around that part of the filesystem and see if there's anything else you'd like to clean up.

cd `brew --prefix`
git checkout master
rm -rf Cellar
bin/brew prune
git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm
rm -rf Library/Homebrew Library/Aliases Library/Formula Library/Contributions Library/Taps Library/LinkedKegs Library/ENV

for file in `find opt -type l 2>/dev/null`; do
  if [ `readlink $file | egrep '^\.\./Cellar'` ]; then
    rm $file
  fi
done

rmdir -p bin Library opt share/man/man1 2> /dev/null
rm -rf .git
rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew
rm -rf ~/Library/Logs/Homebrew
rm -rf /Library/Caches/Homebrew