Chapter 2: Prerequisites

Set up your workspace with required tools and knowledge

Required Tools

System Requirements:

  • macOS (10.14 or later)
  • Administrator access for pmset commands
  • Terminal.app or iTerm2

Command Line Tools:

# Check if you have these installed
which launchctl  # Should return: /bin/launchctl
which pmset      # Should return: /usr/bin/pmset
which caffeinate # Should return: /usr/bin/caffeinate

Time Investment:

  • Initial build: 30 minutes
  • Testing and refinement: 15 minutes
  • Total: 45 minutes

Knowledge Prerequisites

You should be comfortable with:

  • Running commands in Terminal
  • Basic shell scripting (bash)
  • Understanding of file paths and directories
  • Using a text editor (vim, nano, VS Code)

If you're new to shell scripting: Don't worry. I'll explain every command and provide copy-paste examples. This tutorial is designed for practitioners, not experts.

Setup Your Workspace

# Create project directory
mkdir -p ~/automation-projects/claude-pipeline
cd ~/automation-projects/claude-pipeline

# Create subdirectories
mkdir -p logs scripts launchagents

# Verify setup
ls -la

You should see:

drwxr-xr-x  5 user  staff   160 Oct  3 14:30 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 user  staff    96 Oct  3 14:30 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 user  staff    64 Oct  3 14:30 launchagents
drwxr-xr-x  2 user  staff    64 Oct  3 14:30 logs
drwxr-xr-x  2 user  staff    64 Oct  3 14:30 scripts