MacPorts to Homebrew : New Packaging system for Mac OS X

EDIT: This blog and blog post is moved to blog.abhiomkar.in

I just wanted to post a blog on Homebrew because, I started loving it already. Homebrew is the new modern package management system for Mac OS X wich beats MacPorts. Yah! Homebrew is faster.

Homebrew is a Packaging system for Mac OS X 10.5 and above; heavy optimisations, no redundant packages and a bonus beer theme.

Here how you can install Homebrew on your Mac:

I prefer installing homebrew in /usr/local directory.

sudo curl -L http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tarball/master | sudo tar xz --strip 1 -C /usr/local


to avoid using sudo when installing packages, change the owner recursively on /usr/local directory

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local


That’s it. Homebrew installed.

Now, Let’s install wget using homebrew

MacBook:~ abhinay$ brew install wget
==> Downloading http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.12.tar.bz2
File already downloaded and cached to /Users/abhinay/Library/Caches/Homebrew
==> ./configure --disable-debug --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/wget/1.12
==> make install
/usr/local/Cellar/wget/1.12: 9 files, 784K, built in 37 seconds


Really easy! isn’t it?

Have fun!

Note:
If you are facing problem because of MacPorts, try to uninstall it – Uninstall Instructions

and Do check out homebrew homepage on github: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

And one more thing, You should have xcode installed on your Mac – if already don’t have xcode, you can download from here – http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html (Or you can install xcode from your second installation CD of Mac OS X)