Using Homebrew with a minimum of fuss: The Homebrew Survival Guide

Homebrew, a comprehensive package manager, has been increasing in popularity thanks to its ease of use.

- Bruce Byfield

Author

Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist and a freelance writer and editor specializing in free and open source software. In addition to his writing projects, he also teaches live and e-learning courses. In his spare time, Bruce writes about Northwest coast art (http://brucebyfield.wordpress.com). He is also cofounder of Prentice Pieces, a blog about writing and fantasy at https://prenticepieces.com/.

Linux has no shortage of package managers. Besides basic ones such as RPM, DNF, and dpkg/apt-get/ APT, there are supposedly universal ones such as Flatpak and Snap, and increasingly, one for each programming language. Originating in macOS and formerly called Linuxbrew on Linux, Homebrew [1] is especially popular in the Ruby on Rails community. Recently, however, it has started gaining a larger popularity due to its ease of use. If you want to install anything from a project in early development, increasingly there is a good chance that you will need Homebrew to do so. Homebrew offers the option of non-root installation, access to developing software outside your distribution's repositories, and multiple versions of applications. In addition, if you maintain multiple operating systems, you can use the same package manager and set of commands on Linux, macOS, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Homebrew installs files to /home/ linuxbrew and symlinks them to /usr/ local, so that you do not need to be root to use it. Before installing, make sure you have all the necessary packages by running the command

apt install build-essential procps 7

curl file git