How to Install Homebrew on Mac

How to Install Homebrew on Mac

Advanced Mac users may appreciate using the Homebrew package manager, which greatly simplifies the process of installing command line software and tools on a Mac. For example, if you want to easily install favorite command line tools on a Mac like cask, htop, wget, nmap, tree, irssi, links, colordiff, or virtually any other familiar unix command line utility, you can do so with a simple command. Homebrew downloads and builds the package for you. This is obviously aimed at more technically savvy Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line. While theres no particular issue for novice users installing Homebrew on their Mac, the odds of novices finding it useful are slim, unless they intend to embark on learning the command line environment. Contrast that to power users who practically live in a terminal environment, whether longtime Mac users or migrating to the platform from the Windows or Linux world, who will immediately see the value of Homebrew. prerequisites to installing Homebrew on a Mac include the following: Assuming youre interested in installing Homebrew and meet those requirements, then the rest is equally straight forward. The simplest way to install Homebrew is through ruby and curl, accomplished with a single command. This approach is the same for installing Homebrew in all supported versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X. Installation of Homebrew will take a while depending on the speed of your Mac and internet connection, as each necessary package is downloaded and installed by the script. When complete, you will see an Installation successful! message. Now youre ready to install software packages through Homebrew, or you can read the help documentation with the following command: Installing packages with Homebrew is super easy, just use the following syntax: For example, to install wget through Homebrew you could use the following syntax: Simple, easy. Once complete you can run wget as usual. A quick side note; Homebrew is not the only way to install command line software, you can yourself and then compile and make software independently. For example, we discuss and it uses the typical configure and make process. Theres nothing wrong with that approach (and arguably it might be preferable for users who want limited packages and a slimmer footprint) but if youre accustomed to a package manager like dpkg, apt-get, or rpm youll almost certainly appreciate and prefer to use Homebrew. Homebrew now defaults to using anonymized behavioral analytics tracking. If you do not want to participate in that or youd just rather disable the feature to reduce network traffic or for privacy purposes, or whatever other reason, you can run the following command after successfully installing Homebrew on a Mac. This will opt out of Homebrew analytics: Hit return and after a moment or so the analytics tracking in Homebrew will be disabled. If you have installed Homebrew but later decide you want to remove Homebrew from a Mac for some reason or another, you can uninstall it with another ruby script run from the command line: Alternatively, you could download that uninstall script directly and run it yourself. Enjoy Homebrew!