This is step 2 of Installing Ruby on a Mac and covers Wget and oh-my-zsh.

Getting Started

Step 1 - Xcode, Homebrew and Git

_Step 2 - Wget and OH MY ZSHELL_

Step 3 - RVM

Step 4 - Ruby

Step 5 - Gems and Pow

Step 6 – Databases and Rails

Hello World

Note that both steps below are optional but I would recommend you follow them as it might make things easier for you later on.

Wget (optional)

Wget is a command-line tool to retrieve remote files using HTTP, HTTPS or FTP and can be used from scripts or terminals. From the site:

“GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports http, https, and ftp protocols, as well as retrieval through http proxies.”

Features include resuming aborted downloads, support for HTTP proxies and cookies, unattended operations, etc...

Again we will take advantage of Homebrew to install it:

$ brew install wget

Verify the install:

$ wget –version

Output:

GNU Wget 1.13.4 built on darwin11.2.0.

oh-my-zsh (optional)

Quite a few people recommend installing OH MY ZSHELL (aka oh-my-zsh), a framework that provides customization (plugins, themes, tab completion, etc.) for Zsh. Zsh or Z shell is a replacement shell for Bash, the default command language interpreter used by Terminal in OS X.

The install is pretty simple with Wget:

$ wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O - | sh

Follow any instructions you’ll see on the screen until you see the message that tells you that oh-my-zsh “is now installed”.

Restart Terminal and verify that you are now running the Zsh shell:

$ ps -p $$

Output:

PID TTY TIME CMD
2169 ttys000 0:00.08 -zsh

ps is another command-line utility which gives information about running processes. Here we’re asking for the process status (-p) of the process that matches the specified ID. $$ returns the current PID (process identification number), which is the shell here. The name of your shell will be displayed in the CMD column and should be zsh instead of bash if everything went well.

For more info, read the available documentation:

$ man ps

You can always revert back to using Bash by running the command below and restarting Terminal:

$ chsh -s /bin/bash

We will return to this a bit later on but for now if you need more info on customizing ZSH with oh-my-zsh check out this post:

It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds...with ZSH

Let’s carry on with the RVM install…

If you see any inaccuracies, things that should be added, removed or corrected, please either leave a comment or drop me an email. Thanks.