If you’re coming from the Windows ecosystem, then you surely must be aware of winget and how wonderful it is to be able to install almost any package you’d need as a developer with winget. However, when you come to macOS, there’s no winget for it. So how do you get the same convenience? Enter Homebrew or simply brew on the Mac Terminal.
So, first things first, let’s get Homebrew installed on your macOS. Head over to Homebrew’s Github Releases page to grab the latest .pkg for your Mac.
The minimum requirements listed for Homebrew are –
- A 64-bit Intel CPU or Apple Silicon CPU
- macOS Monterey (12) (or higher)
- Command Line Tools (CLT) for Xcode
- The Bourne-again shell for installation (i.e. bash)
You can install the command line tools from a terminal by issuing xcode-select --install or by visiting https://developer.apple.com/download/all/ or using Xcode.
Since Catalina, zsh has been the default shell of macOS. For brew to work however, you would need to set and use bash as your default shell. Before running the installer downloaded earlier, you would need to set bash as your default shell. To do this, click on the Apple logo on the top left of the screen and select System Settings. Then on the left side, select Users & Groups. You should see a list of users. Hold down Ctrl key and click on your own username. You will see the Advanced Options in a context menu. Select it. Now enter your macOS password to allow editing. In the popup, open the dropdown for Login shell and select /bin/bash. Finally, click OK. Now we’re all set to install Homebrew. If you have any Terminal running, quit them and then relaunch to verify that bash is being used. You can always check with ps -p $$ .
Now double click on the .pkg installer downloaded earlier and follow the instructions. Once the installer completes, you will need to add the install path of homebrew to your .bash_profile file. A simple entry of export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin should be enough. You can relaunch the terminal or issue source ~/.bash_profile if you don’t want to restart your current terminal.
All Set! Now you can search and install packages with brew just like you’d do with winget.
brew search <package_name> will list available packages.
brew install <package_name> will install the package.
That’s it.