Table of Contents
Homebrew
Homebrew is a package manager for OS X. The Homebrew project collects and distributes open-source packages aimed at developers. All interaction with Homebrew is via the command line.
All the Homebrew packages install under /usr/local
and are configured
to work in that directory as well. For example, MySQL would normally
store its data files in /var/mysql/data
but Homebrew’s MySQL will
store data in /usr/local/var/mysql
.
If your Homebrew environment ever becomes corrupted you can remove the
entire /usr/local
directory and start again. Homebrew does not mess
with the OS X system applications at all.
Installation
The install command is printed on the Homebrew home page, and can be copy/pasted directly into the terminal. It looks like
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
That one command will download the Homebrew system and put it in the right place. It may ask for your administrator password, and that’s OK.
Usage
Once it’s installed, Homebrew provides the brew
command which is the
primary way to interact with the package manager. For example, to see a
list of all the installed packages use brew list
:
$ brew list
ant freetds libidn2 ncftp saxon
(and many many more)
This list will be empty if you haven’t installed any commands yet.
Brew provides more commands. You can get a list of them via brew help
or from the Homebrew documentation.
Bundle as much of this as possible into a Brewfile and include instructions for using it.