Homebrew describes itself as “The missing package manager for OS X”, which is a pretty apt description. The program is a written in Ruby and it allows users to download as well as install packages from the command-line with ridiculous ease.
1. Using Homebrew
The syntax for Homebrew is incredibly simple. All you have to enter into your Terminal to install packages is:
brew install somepackage
Replace some package with a valid entry and Homebrew will immediately begin download the necessary packages (including those packages necessary for supporting your desired package.) Once installed is equally simple to uninstall packages. Using the following syntax Homebrew will uninstall packages:
brew uninstall somepackage
To search for package, you can use this command:
brew search somepackage
To update your Homebrew packages you just have to enter this simple bit of code:
brew update
2.Getting started using Homebrew
On the Homebrew webpage there are extremely simple directions on how to get started using Hombrew. You can find them here, and can read the home-brew wiki here to find out even more cool things to do with Homebrew. You can also checkout this link to see all the different packages available for download with Homebrew. Below is a list of packages to get started with Homebrew.
curl – A command line tool for transferring protocol using URL syntax. It is capable of doing many things including but not limited to: displaying webpage source code in the Terminal window and downloading webpage source code. Check out the cURL Wikipedia Page or the cURL project homepage.
wget – Similar to cURL, wget is a command line tool for retrieving files using widely accepted internet protocols like HTTP or FTP. To learn more see the wget Wiki or the GNU wget project page.
htop – Htop is an interactive system-monitor/process-viewer originally written for Linux and now available for OS X under a GNU license. To learn more about Htop check out the Htop sourceforge page or its Wikipedia article.
ack – ack bills itself as a “Better than grep” search tool for looking through code. You can visit ack’s homepage betterthangrep.com to learn more.
rtorrent – rTorrent is a command-line torrent downloader that you can get through Homebrew. Checkout the rTorrent project webpage or its Wikipedia article to learn more.
3. Conclusion
With Homebrew, you can have many things from Linux world (well, both Mac OS X and Linux are based on Unix). you will have more power with it, believe me 😉
