After a few years of owning my Mac, I started to feel that maybe, just maybe, it might be a little slower than it used to be. If nothing else, too many failed late night experiments had led to me installing weird systemy things that didn’t always entirely want to go away.
To clean up my baby, I tried out the ‘Archive and Restore’ feature found on my Mac DVD. It reinstalls OSX Leopard replacing the old instance and attempts to leave all of your application and profile settings just how they were.
Upon completion, I am certainly running smoother and faster, but sadly some of my web development setup got broken along the way.
So that it’s clear, my environment involves using these primary components:
- MySQL
- Ruby on Rails
- Apache/Passenger
Here’s an account of what I did to restore my environment to working order:
MySQL, Git
First step, I followed Dan Croak’s setup guide for the following steps (Ruby and RubyGems were already working fine btw):
- XCode Tools
- MySQL
- Git
Apache/Passenger
Then I recovered the following files from my Time Machine backup:
- /usr/local/mysql/data (to get my dev databases back)
- /etc/hosts (to get my local ip shortcuts back)
- /etc/apache2/httpd.conf (to get my apache/passenger settings back)
If you didn’t backup your Apache/Passenger config, you’ll want to re-run
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module
and probably follow John Ford’s Apache setup guide to get Passenger working for you again.
TextMate integration
Redo this for TextMate’s mate command in console:
http://blog.macromates.com/2005/textmate-shell-utility-tmmate/
locate
I also consulted Neil Ang’s blog to get locate working again.
There’s also a way to make it use Spotlight’s index if you check the comments, however this prevents searching directories such as /usr and /bin, but it can be fun if you want locate to follow your Spotlight preferences for search restrictions.
That’s it! Now I’m back to work. I hope this helps someone else out there.