02 - What is brew and how to install it in macos?

Contents

• YouTube video
• If you like this, and want to support me
• Follow me on Twitter
• What is brew and what is it for?
  • (Optional) create ll alias
• Install brew
• Install apps through brew

YouTube video

If you like this, and want to support me

• I create and edit my videos in an m1 mac mini, and it’s starting to stay behind in the editing side of things, tends to slow me down a bit, I’d like to upgrade the machine I use for all my videos to a mac mini with these specs:
  • Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
  • 24GB unified memory
  • 1TB SSD storage
  • 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• If you want to help me reach my goal, you can donate here

Discord server

• After following this guide or even watching the related video, you:
  • Have questions related to one of the tools, configs or scripts that I use
  • Would like me to expand a bit more on how something is done
  • Or simply would like to talk and meet other community members that share your same interests
• join the discord server in this link
• Access to the discord server is only for YouTube community members

Follow me on Twitter

• Or as kids call it these days “X”
• Here’s the link

What is brew and what is it for?

• Brew is a package manager for macOS, it allows us to install apps that are usually not found in the App Store, some of them are open source (free apps) that are normally found in linux for example. But you can also find popular apps like spotify, visual studio code, google chrome, etc.
• How is it to install packages without brew?
  • Imagine you have to install 30 apps on a new computer
  • Go to each website and manually download each DMG file (disk image file)
  • Go through the installation wizard for each file
• How is it to install packages using brew?
  • Instead of going to each site, you install packages through your terminal
  • You can install multiple apps at once
  • Can update all the installed apps through the terminal
  • https://github.com/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest/blob/main/brew/00-base/Brewfile

• In the video you will see I use my old and now unmaintained dotfiles-public repo.
• The repo that is now maintained and up to date is dotfiles-latest.
• All the commands in the blogpost are updated and point to the new dotfiles-latest repo.
  • If you encounter any issues or outdated parts, let me know

(Optional) create ll alias

• Before proceeding, I use the ls -l command a lot to list files inside a directory, so I’ll create an alias for it.
• Instead of typing ls -l, I just type ll
• This is a personal preference, you don’t need to do it

echo "alias ll='ls -lh'" >> ~/.zshrc
echo "alias lla='ls -lha'" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

Install brew

• In the brew documentation https://docs.brew.sh/Installation you can see the macOS Requirements
  • A 64-bit Intel CPU or Apple Silicon CPU
  • macOS Big Sur (11) (or higher)
  • Command Line Tools (CLT) for Xcode (from xcode-select --install or https://developer.apple.com/download/all/) or Xcode
  • The Bourne-again shell for installation (i.e. bash)
• So first I’ll install the Command Line Tools (CLT) for xcode
  • For my internet speed, takes like 20 min to install
  • You don’t need the entire 14GB Xcode app from the appstore

xcode-select --install

• Command below is to uninstall xcode-select
  • do not run the command below, just leaving it here for reference

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

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Then go to the main page https://brew.sh to find the installation command

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

After the installation is completed, notice that you need to configure your shell for homebrew in the Next steps section

echo '' >>~/.zprofile
echo '# Configure shell for brew' >>~/.zprofile
echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >>~/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

Here’s the file that gets modified

cat ~/.zprofile

krishna@chris-m1-mini ~ % cat ~/.zprofile

eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

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Make sure everything’s set up correctly

brew doctor

krishna@chris-m1-mini ~ % brew doctor
Your system is ready to brew.

Install apps through brew

Verification commands to see if these apps are installed

git --version
code --version
neofetch

• Install a few apps using homebrew
• To install apps go to https://formulae.brew.sh and search the app you need
  • brew install git
  • brew install --cask visual-studio-code
  • brew install neofetch
• Each package will have its own caveats at the bottom of the install, see The install mulitple packages video to see how I handle all at once