Command Line Tools

A command-line interface or command language interpreter (CLI), also known as a terminal, is a means of interacting with a computer program where the user issues commands to the program in the form of successive lines of text.

Throughout the course we will emphasize use of the terminal and executing commands within it as our modus operandi.

Mac Users

A command line interface comes already installed with OSX.

You will need to install some other software from the terminal throughout the course, so it will be useful to install some additional "command line tools" now.

Opening a Terminal Session

To open a terminal session:

• Open spotlight with cmd + space
• Type in 'terminal'
• When the terminal appears, open it.

Installing New Tools for the Terminal

The X-code Tools

We want to install 'X-code command line tools'. Copy and paste the following and press Return

sudo xcode-select --install

If you get a message that the command line tools are already installed, you can continue to the next step.

Homebrew Package Manager

Homebrew is a package manager for Mac.

Install Homebrew by opening a terminal and pasting the following command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Verify that Homebrew installed correctly, enter the following into your terminal:

brew doctor

And you should see the following output:

Your system is ready to brew

Before continuing, lets be sure everything in Homebrew is up to date by entering the following:

brew upgrade

Installing Packages with Homebrew

Now we can use homebrew to easily install software. We need some basic system tools for some of the programs we will install later.

In particular we need:

• libxml2
• openssl
• libgit2

Most of these are already installed, but we need updates of these packages. For each of these packages enter:

brew reinstall pkg-name

i.e. brew reinstall libxml2.

If you get a message that the package you are trying to reinstall is not yet installed, try brew install pkg-name instead.

Linking Packages to a Terminal Session

We need to ensure that our terminal session has access to what we installed. To do this we add some extra lines to our bash profile (we will discuss what this means in class - do what we say for now):

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/libxml2/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source .zshrc

Linux & Windows Users

• Linux Users: Open a terminal session with Ctrl + Alt + T.
• Windows Users: Open the Windows Terminal as we described here

Copy the following command into terminal and press Return:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev librtmp-dev

After the installation succeeded successfully repeat this one-by-one with the following two other commands:

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install gdebi-core