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

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

Contents

YouTube video

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    • If you encounter any issues or outdated parts, let me know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
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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
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xcode-select --install
  • Command below is to uninstall xcode-select
    • do not run the command below, just leaving it here for reference
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sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

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

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/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

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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

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cat ~/.zprofile

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

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

Make sure everything’s set up correctly

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brew doctor

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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

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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

Community-driven promotion

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If interested, pricing and all the details can be found in this other page

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This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.