Homebrew Demystified: OS X's Ultimate Package Manager - Tuts+ Computer Skills Tutorial

Homebrew Demystified: OS X's Ultimate Package Manager - Tuts+ Computer Skills Tutorial

What is Homebrew? Homebrew Homebrew is a package manager for OS X, we've covered that much. But what is it actually, in layman terms? To explain that, we need to cover the idea of "packages". Packages Packages are bundles of source code distributed by developers of software, which can be compiled and installed on your machine. They are little more than archives (not unlike zip) packed with various files. So why not refer to them as archives? Well, packages have the specific feature of being what one might call "installable". Packages are installable bundles of source code. When you download a bundle of source code manually, you typically have to unarchive (expand) it, then go into the folder this process produced, run several cryptic commands (make, configure), and finally, with a whole lot of luck, the software gets installed. This will often fail if you don't meet some prerequisites. For example,

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