Boxen

I’ve been eagerly awaiting OS X Mavericks¹ as it promises better battery life - especially for the newest MacBook Air.

The problem with upgrading, however, is cruft. As with most developers’ laptops, my computer is fast, but full of old versions of libraries and programming junk (RubyGems is the main culprit). I thought Mavericks would be a good time to start from scratch, and do a fresh build of my computer.

My current machine is really an extension of my last MacBook Pro, which has been with me since when I first began programming (only a couple years ago). That means that when I picked up my Air, my development setup was hastily put together so that I could be up and running like I was with my MacBook Pro as quickly as possible.

My normal process for setting up a development was as follows:

1. Install Xcode
2. Install Command Line Tools
3. Install Homebrew
4. Install Ruby (using RVM, later rbenv, later chruby)
5. Start cloning projects and bundle install-ing them all.

There’s nothing wrong with this setup - in fact, I’d say it’s fairly sane thanks to Homebrew, which makes installing pretty much any developer tool insanely easy. The problem with it is that it requires me to basically sit and babysit it. For instance, Mavericks’ command-line tool install is a bit different than Mountain Lion’s, and I had to copy a bunch of files around a bit haphazardly to get Homebrew and rbenv to work (I imagine this has been fixed by Homebrew since then). This sort of thing isn’t great, and can lead to some frustration especially if you’re not familiar with a toolchain that you have to adopt.

Thanks to my job’s “10% Time”, where I get the opportunity to either work on or learn open-source technologies, I thought I would give Boxen a try.

Boxen is Github’s dev-ops tool for quickly setting up new development machines. It’s currently Mac-only, but Github uses it in-house to allow new hires to work on the site the day they come in the office. It uses Puppet, which has a pretty simple (Ruby-esque) DSL for writing scripts.

Even better, Boxen has amazing support for organizations. Using Heroku, I deployed Github’s small Rails app, boxen-web, which pulls a Github repo (using an API key, so it can be private) and installs Boxen locally. This means that our setup process removes a few steps.

1. Install Xcode
2. Install Command Line Tools
3. Install Boxen

Boxen has an amazing number of repos for all kinds of things - a large number of developer tools but also normal Mac apps like Dropbox and CloudApp.

Boxen also has support for personal manifest files. If you have dotfiles or even certain applications that you use that the entire team doesn’t (ZSH here, for instance), you can install these on your personal manifest file. By naming it after your Github account, Boxen will automatically use it when you authenticate to your boxen-web server using your Github account.

I’ve been getting closer to having a completely ready Boxen setup for our team, but there are a couple issues that I’ve ran into. The first is that documentation is a little sparse. I’m not terribly familiar with Puppet, and I imagine I can’t be the only one. I’m going to read some more documentation², but a lot of customization past installing the plain modules is a little sparse.

The Mac App Store is a bit of a wrench as well. There is a 1Password module, for example, on the Boxen organization, but my 1Password is installed from the App Store. There doesn’t seem to be any official documentation or even issues/pull-requests for this, so if it continues to be a problem past one or two apps, I may open one myself.

Finally, I’m a little concerned about the install process with Mavericks. This isn’t a problem with Boxen, but it certainly is a problem since Mavericks will likely come out this year, and our team will begin upgrading when it does. It’s the perfect time to use something like Boxen, and if the process blows up on someone not prepared to dig into the local Boxen repo and troubleshoot, it could get really complicated. A page on the Homebrew wiki confirms a lot of the Mavericks errors I’ve been seeing - the default standard library for C++ is now libc++, causing things to break. I think this will be resolved by Homebrew in some fashion before the official release of Mavericks, so maybe this just comes with the territory of using pre-release software.

Otherwise, it’s been a nice install. I think that if your team’s ops guy or Boxen maintainer irons out some of the kinks found in the our-boxen example provided, it can be a great resource for fresh computers for both developers and designers alike.

Footnotes

1. This link currently points to the 10.9 OS X Mavericks preview page. ↩

2. I’m starting with Puppet Lab’s official Learning Puppet guide and the our-boxen README. ↩