This document covers how to set up an arm64 Macbook as a developer machine. It provides installation steps in this README, and a few baseline dot files as a GitHub release asset. It is geared towards Go, Java, Python and JavaScript development.

All commands in this README should be executed from the user's home directory.

For using MacPorts instead of Homebrew as the package manager, refer to MacPorts-README.

xcode-select --install

• iTerm2

• Amazon Corretto 11

• DejaVu Sans Mono font

  Download. Unzip. Search for "Font Book" app. File --> Add Fonts to Current User.

Use the macOS default Terminal app.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)
brew update
brew upgrade

Add the following line to both ~/.zshrc and ~/.bash_profile. Restart terminal.

eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)

brew install bash bash-completion@2

Put bash inside /usr/local/bin (/bin/bash is too old).

pushd /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -s /opt/homebrew/bin/bash
popd

Change the default shell for both human (Admin) user and root.

chsh -s /bin/bash
sudo chsh -s /bin/bash

Restart computer for the default shell change to take effect.

Open iTerm2, go to Settings -> Profiles -> Default (profile) -> General. For the "Command" configuration option, set it to "Command" with a value of /usr/local/bin/bash -l -i. Untick "Load shell integration automatically".

Under Default (profile) -> Colors, untick both "Use bright version of ANSI colors for bold text" and "Use custom color for bold text".

From now on perform all CLI operations in iTerm2.

brew install git

brew install neovim

pyenv is a CLI tool written in shell scripts. It installs multiple versions of Python by downloading and compiling them from C source code. First we install various tools that are needed to compile Python interpreters.

brew install openssl readline sqlite3 xz zlib tcl-tk

Now install pyenv via git clone into the ~/.pyenv folder.

git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv
pushd ~/.pyenv && src/configure && make -C src && popd

brew install pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install poetry
pipx inject poetry poetry-plugin-export

brew install go

fnm is a Node versions manager that doesn't cause a noticeable slow down at activation. The CLI interface is largely similar to that of nvm.

brew install fnm

After installation, pin it to avoid unnecessary frequent version upgrade. It's enough to upgrade for every minor version bump only.

brew install awscli
brew pin awscli

For authentication against GitHub, the most convenient option is to use the GitHub CLI. To install, run the following commands.

brew install gh

brew install shellcheck

Get baseline dot files from GitHub. Note that they overwrite existing local ones.

curl -o dot-files.zip -L https://github.com/kxue43/dot-files/releases/latest/download/dot-files-initial.zip
unzip -o dot-files.zip
rm dot-files.zip

Optionally, put environment-specific Bash configurations in ~/.env.bashrc. It will be sourced by ~/.bashrc if exists. See the same-named file in this repo for a template file.

git config --global user.name YOUR_USER_NAME
git config --global user.email YOUR_EMAIL

go install github.com/kxue43/cli-toolkit/cmd/toolkit@latest
go install github.com/kxue43/cli-toolkit/cmd/toolkit-assume-role@latest
go install github.com/kxue43/cli-toolkit/cmd/toolkit-serve-static@latest
go install github.com/kxue43/cli-toolkit/cmd/toolkit-show-md@latest
go install mvdan.cc/sh/v3/cmd/shfmt@latest

We install them manually to avoid the Oracle OpenJDK that comes from brew install ....

First google "Amazon Corretto" and install an LTS version (8, 11, 17 or 21).

Create a file ~/.env.bashrc using the starter template in this repo (it's not included in dot-files-initial.zip). Uncomment the line containing the following content and set the installed Java version.

#export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v <SET-HERE>)

Source ~/.bashrc to refresh settings.

source ~/.bashrc

Manually install Maven and Gradle. Set their desired version numbers first. Packages are installed in ~/.local/lib. Symlinks to the binaries are created in ~/.local/bin.

export MVN_VERSION=3.9.10
export GRADLE_VERSION=8.14.2

curl -o ~/Downloads/apache-maven-${MVN_VERSION}-bin.zip -L https://dlcdn.apache.org/maven/maven-3/${MVN_VERSION}/binaries/apache-maven-${MVN_VERSION}-bin.zip
unzip -d ~/.local/lib ~/Downloads/apache-maven-${MVN_VERSION}-bin.zip
pushd ~/.local/bin && \
ls ~/.local/lib/apache-maven-${MVN_VERSION}/bin | xargs -I % sh -c "ln -s $HOME/.local/lib/apache-maven-${MVN_VERSION}/bin/%" && \
popd

curl -o ~/Downloads/gradle-${GRADLE_VERSION}-bin.zip -L https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-${GRADLE_VERSION}-bin.zip
unzip -d ~/.local/lib ~/Downloads/gradle-${GRADLE_VERSION}-bin.zip
pushd ~/.local/bin && \
ln -s $HOME/.local/lib/gradle-${GRADLE_VERSION}/bin/gradle && \
popd

rm ~/Downloads/apache-maven-${MVN_VERSION}-bin.zip 
rm ~/Downloads/gradle-${GRADLE_VERSION}-bin.zip

Download a Groovy SDK bundle into the ~/Downloads folder, e.g. use this link. Set the GROOVY_VERSION environment variable below to the corresponding version.

export GROOVY_VERSION=4.0.27

unzip -d ~/.local/lib ~/Downloads/apache-groovy-sdk-${GROOVY_VERSION}.zip
pushd ~/.local/bin && \
ls ~/.local/lib/groovy-${GROOVY_VERSION}/bin | grep -v '\.bat$' | grep -v '\.ico$' | xargs -I % sh -c "ln -s $HOME/.local/lib/groovy-${GROOVY_VERSION}/bin/%" && \
popd

rm ~/Downloads/apache-groovy-sdk-${GROOVY_VERSION}.zip

Open ~/.env.bashrc, uncomment the line containing the following content and set the installed Groovy version.

#export GROOVY_HOME=$HOME/.local/lib/groovy-<SET-HERE>

According to VSCode documentation:

When VS Code is opened, it launches a login shell environment in order to source a shell environment.

By default, the (integrated) terminal inherits this environment.

After experiment, it was discovered that, as of 2025-09-20, the login shell that VSCode launches at its start-up is also interactive. That is, this shell sources ~/.bash_profile (which does nothing other than sourcing ~/.bashrc), and all integrated terminal thereafter inherits this environment.

We should put the following piece in the global settings.json of VSCode.

  "terminal.integrated.profiles.osx": {
    "bash": {
      "path": "bash",
      "args": ["-i"]
    }
  },
  "terminal.integrated.defaultProfile.osx": "bash",

Otherwise the directories $HOME/go/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/.pyenv/bin will be appended to the end of PATH instead of prepended to the beginning. The -i argument means the ~/.bashrc file is sourced again at the creation of the integrated terminal.