cmd / laptop

updated October 21, 2026

I maintain a laptop repo that configures a macOS machine as a software development environment.

Install

export LAPTOP="$HOME/laptop"
git clone https://github.com/croaky/laptop.git $LAPTOP
cd $LAPTOP
./laptop.sh

What it sets up

The script is idempotent. I run it on macOS on Apple Silicon. It:

• installs system packages with Homebrew
• sets the shell to zsh
• symlinks dotfiles to $HOME
• installs Go, Rust, and Go tools: deadcode, goimports, gopls
• installs tsgo and dprint as single binaries
• installs CLIs: awscli, bat, cb, fd, fzf, gh, git, ripgrep, tree, ubi, pgfmt
• manages local apps and blocks trackers in /etc/hosts with hostctl
• sets up Neovim
• starts Postgres dev and test clusters

No JavaScript runtime

The machine has no node, npm, or bun. tsgo, dprint, esbuild's Go API, and native language servers cover what those ran. See web / no js runtime for the native toolchain.

Hosts file

hostctl manages /etc/hosts for local development and DNS-level ad blocking. laptop.sh runs it.

Local apps

Browsers treat http://localhost and http://*.localhost as potentially trustworthy origins, so Secure Context features work without TLS.

I run apps on different subdomains and ports (site.localhost:2000, htmz.localhost:2002) to test cross-origin security:

• SameSite=Strict cookies
• Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin and Origin headers
• Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin header

Ad blocking

A hosts file blocks ads and trackers across every app on the laptop. hostctl enables blocking by default:

hostctl

To disable blocking while keeping local app entries:

hostctl --unblock

Core script logic:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

if [[ "${1:-}" == "--unblock" ]]; then
  cat /etc/hosts.local | sudo tee /etc/hosts >/dev/null
else
  curl -s https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt | tr -d '\r' | sudo tee /etc/hosts >/dev/null
  cat /etc/hosts.local | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts >/dev/null
fi
sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Server configuration

A Go server binds to a port, and the hosts file resolves the subdomain:

fmt.Println("Serving at http://site.localhost:2000")
http.ListenAndServe(":2000", handler)

I use the 2000 port range for Go servers and 3000 for Ruby servers.

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