Homebrew is a software package management application for macOS and also for Linux. It makes installing new software and updating existing software very easy for everyone. It has a repository of thousands of programs that work flawlessly. When installing a new software using Homebrew, we do not have to worry about various dependencies as it takes care of everything on its own automatically. Similarly, updating and removing existing applications is also a breeze through Homebrew.
But before you can start installing, updating or removing applications using Homebrew, you have to install Homebrew first on your Mac. The developers of Homebrew have made it extremely easy for anyone to install it on their Mac system just by using a single command. Here is how:
- Open terminal on your Mac by clicking on the Terminal icon or using the hotkey Command (⌘)+Space, typing terminal and pressing Enter.
- In Terminal, give the installer command that is displayed on https://brew.sh/. You can copy-paste this command from this website into Terminal.
- Enter your system admin password which is required for the command to work as it is using sudo. If you do not have an admin account then you should ask the system admin to do it for you.
- The command will download a lot of files, verify them, install them on your Mac and then do the cleanup. Basically it downloads around 1 GB of data and takes nearly 10 minutes to finish everything. At the end, you will see the message “Installation successful”. Now you can enjoy using Homebrew on your Mac.
After you have installed Homebrew on your Mac successfully, you can install anything using command brew install packagename. For example, in order to install AESCrypt (encryption/decryption program) on your Mac, you can give the command brew install aescrypt. Homebrew handles everything and places an icon in the Applications folder too so that you can launch the newly installed app easily. You can find all the available packages on the Homebrew website at https://formulae.brew.sh/.
This is so easy to do… I am trying to do it on Manjaro Linux.