First we need to ensure we have the latest stable version of Node installed. A quick way to check is to open terminal.app and run

node -v

If the command isn't found or the version is less than 0.10.x then we'll need install or upgrade Node.

We can head over to http://nodejs.org and click the install button, this will download a .pkg installer, all we need to do is run it and follow the installer steps.

A great way to quickly upgrade is to run the following in our terminal

sudo npm i -g n
sudo n stable

nscale also depends on Git, we can check whether this is installed by opening a terminal and typing

git --version

If we recieve a command not found error, then there's a number of ways we can install, if we have homebrew installed we can do

brew install git

Alternatively we can use the OS X package installer

nscale uses both git and Github extensively, in order for commands like nsd system clone to work. We need to have the git user name and email set to our Github login and have ssh-keys set up with Github.

To set our Github use and email we do:

git config --global user.name "<user name>"
git config --global user.email "<email>"

To generate keys:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "<email>"

Finally we can copy the contents of id_rsa.pub (having chosen where to store it with ssh-keygen) to Github (see Adding SSH keys to Github for help).

We can test if our keys are correctly set up like so:

ssh -T -o "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" [email protected]

If we're correctly set up, Github will respond that we're succesfully authenticated.

Docker provides containers, that can be thought of as isolated environments that provide the benefits of running virtual machines but at much lower resource cost (see What is Docker for more).

If we don't have docker installed, plugin the USB provided and follow the Boot2docker OSX Installation guide.

Alternatively follow the installation guide for OS X but this setup will take much longer.

The main NPM module for nscale is called nscale.

To install nscale we simply run

sudo npm i -g nscale

This will provide an executable named nsd (standing for nscale Deployer), which is the main tool for managing distrubuted systems deployment.

We can test that the install was successful by attempting to run the executable:

nsd

This should show the help output.

• OS X Development Quick Start Guide