macOS Development Setup Guide
Written on
When I got this MacBook Pro 14" with 24 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage a few months ago, the first thing I wanted to do was to have a development setup that didn’t involve separate version managers for each programming language, running the risk of dependency hell, and constant frustration in managing those.
Things have changed a lot over the last few years since the last time I set up my workflow. Previously, I used a combination of miniconda, nvm, etc.
But it’s 2026, and what was great a few years ago is now replaced by newer tools that do the same job, but much faster and more efficiently.
In this post, I’ll go over each step of setting up a working development environment on macOS. This tutorial assumes you’re starting from a fresh, clean install of macOS, and will focus primarily on the essentials.
However, I plan to write another blog post down the line for setting up the Mac to work with local LLMs, which was my rationale for getting this Mac! 😎
1. Xcode Command Line Tools
The first thing to install is the Xcode Command Line Tools package. This will install Unix developer and compiler tools such as clang, make, git, etc. It is crucial for the next step, which is installing Homebrew.
To install it, enter the following command in the Terminal:
xcode-select --install
2. Homebrew
Homebrew is a command-line interface (CLI) based package manager for macOS (as well as Linux). This is a useful tool that eliminates the need to download .dmg files, manage updates and dependencies, and, all in all, helps keep things simple.
To install Homebrew, enter this command in the Terminal (or refer to the official site):
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Following that, you will need to enter these lines (it should indicate it during your installation).
your_user is your Mac user (or Home) folder name in the /Users directory.
echo >> /Users/your_user/.zprofile
echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv zsh)"' >> /Users/your_user/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv zsh)"
3. Mise
With Homebrew installed, the first package to install is Mise. It is a Rust-based utility tool that manages language versions, environments, and a task runner. Previously, this was done using nvm, pyenv, and so on. With this, we can manage language versions in one place, and we will install python, node, and java.
To install mise, enter the following command in the Terminal:
brew install mise
Include the zsh activation command in the .zshrc, and run source ~/.zshrc to reload the Zsh configuration file in the current Terminal session
echo 'eval "$(mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
To confirm mise is installed, run mise -V to check which version is installed. If it does not give the intended message, you may need to redo the earlier steps.
Now that the tool is installed, we will install node, python, and java; run the following commands sequentially. You are free to choose whichever version suits you the best, but as of this writing, these are the versions of the language I am using.
mise use --global node@lts
mise use --global python@3.13
mise use --global java@corretto-25
And to confirm each language is installed, run a which for each of the languages to confirm their existence: which node, which python, which java
4. uv
uv is a Rust-based Python package and version manager that serves as a faster and more efficient alternative to pip, pyenv, etc.
It can be installed via Homebrew:
brew install uv
To use it, create an example folder test_uv on your Desktop (or wherever you prefer), and access it in VS Code (see below to install) or Terminal (via cd Desktop/test_uv)
Inside the folder, to initialize uv, run uv init. This sets up an initial project scaffolding, as well as git version control for your project.
To create a virtual environment, run uv sync, and it will use information stored within pyproject.toml to install the specified dependencies. Right now, there is nothing there, so we will try to install one dependency, bs4 (BeautifulSoup4)
Activate the virtual environment (source .venv/bin/activate) and run uv add bs4, and you should get the following output:
(test-uv) vkumar@Viveks-MacBook-Pro test_uv % uv add bs4
Resolved 5 packages in 448ms
Prepared 4 packages in 175ms
Installed 4 packages in 4ms
+ beautifulsoup4==4.15.0
+ bs4==0.0.2
+ soupsieve==2.9.1
+ typing-extensions==4.16.0
5. VS Code & Docker
With the essentials installed, you have everything that is needed for your dev setup on your Mac. To be able to work with those languages, for instance, if you want to set up a Python project, you’d need a code editor or an integrated development environment (IDE). In this tutorial, we will be installing the code editor, Visual Studio Code.
To install it, enter the following command. The --cask flag tells Homebrew to install and manage the graphical user interface (GUI) applications.
brew install --cask visual-studio-code
This step is completely optional, but it is good to have it for development needs, and that is Docker.
It is an open-source platform that lets you build, test, and deploy applications in isolated environments called containers. A good use case is if you want to use MySQL for your project; Docker avoids the need to install it with brew. This has the benefits of not having background services, and only running when you need to run them.
Enter the following command to install Docker:
brew install --cask docker
6. Git & Github
Git is an open-source program that allows you to keep track of your projects in version control. GitHub is a platform where you can put those project files tracked with Git on the web for others to see.
git should already have been installed if you have done the first step to install Xcode Command Line Tools. By default, it will not work with GitHub off the bat; it will require you to set it up.
First, you will need to configure the credentials for Git. Add in your username and email, so replace the placeholder my_user with your actual username and email.
git config --global user.name "my_user"
git config --global user.email "my_user@gmail.com"
To make GitHub work with your local git repository, you will need to set up authentication. You can use Personal Access Tokens (PATs), but it is recommended to use SSH Keys instead.
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "my_user@gmail.com"
Run pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub to get the public key into your clipboard, and go to the SSH Keys page on GitHub. Click on New SSH Key and paste it.
Using an SSH Key, you will clone GitHub projects using SSH. You can do this automatically in VS Code, or run the following command to clone my GitHub repo dna-to-amino-translator (this is just for an example, but it should still work!)
git@github.com:vkumar825/dna-to-amino-translator.git