Environment Consistency – Directories (Apple Mac)

We need to make our life easier by creating consistency for every machine. What this means is every machine you try to use, whether it be yours or your colleagues, the environment will be the same when you sit down to help them with something. This is very important if you’re a Development Manager and you’re trying to help one of your staff.

This is one of several posts in regards to this subject.

As I mentioned, I support both a Windows environment and an Apple Mac environment and we have a different way of handling our “directories” for each environment.  We’re going to talk about the Apple Mac here.

There are two “directories” that are important when developing our software.  There is the “NetBeansProjects” directory and the “NetBeansLibraries” directory.

Our first directory is where NetBeans stores our projects.  When NetBeans is installed it created a directory called “NetBeansProjects” in the “${HOME}/Documents” directory on the Apple Mac.  Now, to keep things consistent, we’re going to do something extra on each Apple Mac.

For the Apple Mac, we need to create a symbolic link.  Start up a “Terminal” session and execute the following command:

ln -sf ${HOME}/Documents/NetBeansProjects /NetBeansProjects

Terminal - Using ln -sf command

Now, everyone that uses an Apple Mac, when they are using NetBeans, should create projects in /NetBeansProjects, NOT in ${HOME}/Documents/NetBeansProjects.  Sounds stupid but it helps, trust me.

The NetBeansLibraries directory is just a directory that we’re going to create in /.  We’ll populate it with data in a later post.

mkdir /NetBeansLibraries

Creating /NetBeansLibraries

This directory will be populated with third party libraries and other files that we can use while developing our software.  Again, we’ll do this in a later post.