Homebrew

Courtesy of https://twitter.com/MacHomebrew/

Homebrew, the OS X package manager, not the beverage, is the third package manager I've used on OS X. I started in 2005 with Fink and MacPorts. MacPorts seemed to be more active, especially with the flurry of Leopard releases. Indeed it also has some advanced features including dependencies to let you install MAMP stacks. However, I find I prefer to have control of my MAMP stack especially in my volatile development environments, upgrades can be particularly painful with MacPorts.

Homebrew has quite a different approach. There is no need for sudo, all binaries get symlinks in /usr/local, but point to /usr/local/Cellar which controls the formula (aka package) version. The formula scripts are ruby based, so adding your own is very easy.

If you don't want to search forumlae via the command-line then head to http://braumeister.org/ (another GitHub project).

Installation is pretty simple. If you are a developer, e.g. you have Xcode installed it is probably a one-liner. Installation alongside MacPorts is not recommended, but to check you can get everything you need from Homebrew it will probably not cause too many problems.

Now you have brew in your path lets explore some use cases:

• brew list - list installed formulae
• brew search wget - search for formula called wget
• brew info wget - get information about the formula wget
• brew install wget - install wget
• brew uninstall wget -uninstall wget
• brew update - update homebrew (effectively a git pull)
• brew outdated - list formulae which are out of date
• brew upgrade - upgrade all outdated formulae

For more features see the FAQ and follow @MacHomebrew.

Now I wonder if I can convince puppet to use Homebrew over MacPorts...