Installing Homebrew on Mac

I often receive complaints from developers and administrators about the lack of a centralized package system on the Mac. While Apple did provide installer, the Darwin-era package installation app, it did not really have any sort of repository system until the App Store was released with Snow Leopard. MacPorts, the successor of DarwinPorts, was the de-facto package manager for enthusiasts for a long time. But in recent years a lot of the community has switched over to Homebrew for their package management.

Homebrew provides a neat little ruby script ot install it on your mac. Simply run the following in your Terminal:

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

It should go through the steps of installation, explaining the places it will install to. It will ask for your sudo password and then finish up. Once it is installed, you can install any number of great GNU and other packages that are ready-made to work on your Mac. For example, to install the popular intrusion detection system snort, simply type:

brew install snort

Homebrew behaves much the same way you’d expect apt or yum to behave, with a few nuances that don’t affect it’s usability. It is my primary package manager and favorite way of installing new software on my Mac.