What is Homebrew
Homebrew is a popular package manager for macOS similar to apt-get on Debian or pacman on Arch. It is trivial to install and instantly provides a huge repository of software, almost all open source and free, to install on-demand. According to the creators of Homebrew, “Homebrew is the missing package manager for macOS” and that it will “install the stuff you need that Apple didn’t.”
With that, let’s get started.
First things first
Install XCode command line tools if you haven’t already installed it. Open the terminal window and execute the following command.
xcode-select -install
Installing Homebrew
Once command line tools installed you’re ready to install Homebrew by running the following command in the terminal window.
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Wait for the download to start and for the installer to finish. That’s it!
Once the installation is complete you may also run the below command to insure everything is configured correctly.
brew doctor
The above command will show the instructions for correcting any issues.
Installing software packages
Once you’ve got Homebrew installed, you can now install your desired software packages, called formulae. For example, let’s say I wanted to install Git. With Homebrew, installing Git is easy as this:
brew install git
That’s it! Super fast and easy.
Since we just installed Homebrew, we could have skipped brew update, but it’s a good habit to run it before installing anything with Homebrew because Homebrew is updated regularly.
Next steps
Once you start hacking away on your computer, you will most likely need to install more tools with Homebrew. Before you do, remember to always run brew update. To upgrade your local packages, run brew upgrade.
Want to learn more about Brew on your own? Check out: https://brew.sh
