Using Homebrew with a minimum of fuss

Command Line – Homebrew

© Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

© Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

Article from Issue 262/2022
Author(s):

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

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 curl file git

[...]

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