Homebrew

Our personal computer is full of applications and terminal commands (ls, git, nvm, etc.) that we use every day. For Apps, we use the App store, or we install then via a download. Terminal commands can be tricky, sometimes they need a specific build step customized to your machine. Homebrew makes this process a breeze. Compare it like npm for your terminal commands.

Packages are made available through so called ‘taps’. A tap is a repository that contains a list of packages. Homebrew has a default tap called homebrew/core that contains a lot of packages. But there are other taps that contain packages. For example the homebrew/cask tap contains a lot of applications. (yep, you can use homebrew to install -and manage- applications)

Installation

See brew.sh for the installation instructions. Copy-paste that installation command in your terminal and follow the instructions.

General usage

Install a package

Let us install a package called ‘tree’ that displays the content of a directory in a visual (tree) structure. We can install it with the following command:

brew install tree

You get some logs in your terminal that shows you the progress of the installation. Once it is done, you can use the tree command in your terminal. Depending on where you are located in the file system, it will display the content of the current directory.

$ tree
.
|-- README.md
`-- hello.txt

0 directories, 2 files

Search for a package

If you are not really sure if a certain package is available through Homebrew, you can search for it. You can search using the website or via the command line. For instance, if you want to search for a package to convert fonts to woff2 format:

$ brew search woff2
==> Formulae
woff2 ✔

It seems like a package woff2 is available. When you install it, you will have woff2_compress and woff2_decompress available in your terminal.

Update packages

You can run brew update to update the registry of packages. This will not update the packages themselves. Therefore, you have to run brew upgrade.

Uninstall a package

To uninstall a package, you can run brew uninstall <package-name>.

Happy brewing!