brew

brew, or known by its longer name as Homebrew, bills itself as the “missing package manager for OS X”.

$ brew install rsync
==> Installing rsync from homebrew/dupes
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles-dupes/rsync-3.1.2.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring rsync-3.1.2.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/rsync/3.1.2: 8 files, 748.2K

That’s right - brew uses emojis as part of its standard output 🙌

Various Linux distributions include package managers for installing software out of the box (e.g. apt-get for Ubuntu), and brew is a third-party effort to replicate the same for OS X. As an example of brew usage, above is an example of installing rsync.

To install brew, the official Homebrew website directs you to run this command, which incidentally explains itself as it runs:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Useful Options / Examples

brew install [package-name]

$ brew install rsync
==> Installing rsync from homebrew/dupes
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles-dupes/rsync-3.1.2.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring rsync-3.1.2.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/rsync/3.1.2: 8 files, 748.2K
Break it down
  • The brew install [package-name] command is the command for installing various brew packages.
  • There is a public list of available packages that brew pulls from. Each package has a “formula”, or package definition, that brew can parse.
  • Upon picking a formula, like node, wget, or cowsay, brew retrieves the formula and follows the instructions (e.g. downloading the appropriate files) to install that package.

brew remove [package-name]

$ brew remove rsync
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/rsync/3.1.2... (8 files, 748.2K)
Break it down
  • The brew remove command is the command for uninstalling various brew packages, given the name of a package, using the package’s formula.

brew update

$ brew update
Updated Homebrew from 86fc508 to 5531fd9.
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/dupes).
==> New Formulae
...
==> Updated Formulae
...
==> Deleted Formulae
...
Break it down
  • brew update updates brew to the latest version, directly from brew’s GitHub repository.
  • This includes refreshing brew’s “taps”, which are essentially lists of formulae that your installation of brew can see. Above, you can see that I have one tap - homebrew/dupes, which has duplicates of useful Linux-y tools like rsync, screen, and less.

brew upgrade

$ brew upgrade
==> Upgrading 2 outdated packages, with result:
boost 1.60.0_1, coreutils 8.25
==> Upgrading boost
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/boost-1.60.0_1.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring boost-1.60.0_1.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/boost/1.60.0_1: 11,139 files, 436.0M
==> Upgrading coreutils
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/coreutils-8.25.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring coreutils-8.25.el_capitan.bottle.tar.gz
==> Summary
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/coreutils/8.25: 216 files, 8.3M
Break it down
  • brew upgrade upgrades all of ones’ packages to the latest releases.

brew list

$ brew list
autoconf	cowsay		gdbm		libtool		openssl		rbenv		sqlite
automake	dfu-util	gettext		libusb		pkg-config	readline	tmux
boost		fortune		gnu-getopt	mongodb		postgresql	ruby-build	valgrind
coreutils	gdb			libevent	node		python		scons		xz
Break it down
  • brew list lists all of the brew packages that one has installed. For instance, you can see that I’ve installed mongodb, node, and python, among others.

brew search [text]

$ brew search wget
wget						wgetpaste                                                 

$ brew search /*get*/
gengetopt        gnu-getopt ✔     languagetool     libgetdata       vegeta           wgetpaste        wxwidgets      
Caskroom/cask/igetter                   Caskroom/cask/join-together             Caskroom/cask/pwnagetool
Break it down
  • brew search [text] or brew search [/text/] takes the input text, and tries to match it against all the packages it can find, including looking other popular taps.
  • It also accepts regular expressions wrapped in /, like the second example /*get*/ above.