Homebrew
Installing Homebrew
Higher privileges needed when installing Homebrew
Installing Homebrew itself does need root privileges to be able to create certain
directories and change their ownership. Later, when installing bottles, root
privileges are not required anymore except for casks that get installed to
/Applications. Therefore your macOS user account need to be able to adminster
the computer.
Installing Homebrew is pretty easy by just running the installer. The Homebrew site illustrates this well:
The Xcode Command Line Tools are required to install software with Homebrew. You can install these
beforehand or let Homebrew ask you to do so. In any case use the command xcode-select --install
to install these.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
On Linux the installation of the requirements works quite differently. Find more details in the documentation of Homebrew On Linux.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Using Homebrew
The help command shows us the most used commands:
$ brew --help
Example usage:
brew search TEXT|/REGEX/
brew info [FORMULA|CASK...]
brew install FORMULA|CASK...
brew update
brew upgrade [FORMULA|CASK...]
brew uninstall FORMULA|CASK...
brew list [FORMULA|CASK...]
Troubleshooting:
brew config
brew doctor
brew install --verbose --debug FORMULA|CASK
Contributing:
brew create URL [--no-fetch]
brew edit [FORMULA|CASK...]
Further help:
brew commands
brew help [COMMAND]
man brew
https://docs.brew.sh
man brew
The manpage of the Homebrew is really a good read especially for terminology
and details, see man brew!
Updating Homebrew
Warning
Do not confuse the commands update and upgrade!
The command brew update will update Homebrew itself and this in principle means
the brew command and the local working copy of the repository that holds the formulae
(a git pull --ff-only is done). After that command your Homebrew knows the latest
version of all formulae and can tell you those that are newer as what you have installed.
The installed software itself is not updated.
Installing software
The command brew install will install a software aka formula and all of its dependencies,
i.e brew install wget.
There are so called taps, which stands for repositories containg formulae that install
software. By default the taps homebrew-core and homebrew-cask are already known
and formulae can easily be installed using brew install FORMULAE.
homebrew-corecontains formulae for software that gets bottled (compiled) and distributedhomebrew-caskcontains forumlae for software that is already compiled by the upstream vendor, i.e. google-chrome, firefox.
One can create its own tap. As an example puppetlabs has its own tap to distribute puppet, pdk and the like, which means one can tap their tap and install the software using homebrew though it's not contained in default Homebrew:
brew tap puppetlabs/puppet
brew install pdk
brew bundle
Manually installing software may be useful on a one by one basis. But imagine
installing all your software after reinstalling your operating system? Do you even
remember what you had/need? Would it be easier to have a list of stuff you need,
that is even versioned? Reinstalling the machine? Easy, reinstall, clone your repo
and run brew bundle --file Brewfile. Brewfile is an arbitrary text file with
content that my look like this:
tap "pubppetlabs/puppet"
brew "findutils"
brew "wget"
cask "firefox"
mas 'Remote Desktop', id: 409907375
The keywords denote how the packages get installed:
| line in Brewfile | Command run |
|---|---|
| tap "pubppetlabs/puppet" | brew tap puppetlabs/puppet |
| brew "findutils" | brew install findutils |
| cask "firefox" | brew install --cask firefox |
| mas 'Remote Desktop', id: 409907375 | mas install 409907375 |
This file can be created from what you currently have using brew bundle dump
--file Brewfile.
See the brew bundle section of the brew man output
or brew bundle --help or homebrew-bundle for more details. See mas-cli for
the documentation of the mas cli tool.
Upgrading installed software
Homebrew formulae get frequently updated as their maintainers take care of "their
formulae". This means whenever a certain software is updated, so is the forumlae.
Upgrading the wget package we just installed is done by running the command brew
upgrade wget. To upgrade all software that we have so far, just run brew upgrade.
Curious beforehand what would be updated? Just run brew outdated to see the list
of available upgrades.
Cleanup the cellar
When upgrade your installed software, Homebrew will keep old versions and the
downloaded packages (tar.gz, dmgs, ...). To get rid of this old stuff you may
run brew cleanup.
Further Stuff
Scripts
The following script summarizes most of the above tasks into a single script/function. It will update Homebrew, then check if new version of installed formulae is available and ask if you upgrade should be carried out. In any case a cleanup run ends the script. Either add it to its own file, make it executable and put it somewhere in the path, i.e. ~/bin or define as function in your ~/.bash_profile.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
blue=$(tput setaf 33)
red=$(tput setaf 124)
reset=$(tput sgr0)
function prompt_confirm
{
while true; do
printf "\r[ ${yellow}??${reset} ] ${1:-Continue?} [y/n]: ";
read -r -n 1 REPLY;
case $REPLY in
[yY])
echo;
return 0
;;
[nN])
echo;
return 1
;;
*)
printf " ${red} %s \n${reset}" "invalid input"
;;
esac;
done
}
echo "[ ${blue}..${reset} ] Updating Homebrew";
brew update;
out=$(brew outdated);
if [ ! -z "${out}" ]; then
echo "[ ${blue}..${reset} ] The following updates are available:";
echo $out;
if [ "${1}" = "-f" ] || prompt_confirm "Shall I upgrade all?"; then
brew upgrade;
brew cleanup;
fi;
fi;
echo "[ ${blue}..${reset} ] Running brew doctor";
brew doctor