installing-homebrew-for-OSX

A little less than a year ago, I started managing open source packages on my OS X laptops using Homebrew. Since then, I've completely stopped using Fink and macports and happiness has ensued. If you are looking for a package manager for OSX, Homebrew is what you want.

Way back when, I posted on how I installed Homebrew, and those instructions are a bit out of date. So for those interested, here's a quick way to bootstrap a new OS X system for Homebrew and git goodness.

sudo chown -R $USER:staff /usr/local

curl -Lsf http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tarball/master | \
    tar xvz -C/usr/local --strip 1

brew install git

git clone http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git /tmp/homebrew
mv /tmp/homebrew/.git /usr/local/
rm -rf /tmp/homebrew

And that's it. The basic brew commands are:

brew search FOO
brew info FOO
brew install FOO
brew uninstall FOO
brew list

Some other useful commands include:

# update homebrew to latest set of "formula"
brew update

# show which installed packages are out of date
brew outdated

There are now a number of brew extensions that provide additional functionality and serve as examples of how to bend brew to your will. Take a look at /usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples to see what's available (files in this directory with a name like brew-BAR.rb can be invoked using brew BAR.

Enjoy.

archived on 2010-08-19 in , ,

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