A Package Manager is used to manage software on an operating system. Although OS X comes with it's own package management (The App Store) it's limited to Apples restrictions. There are currently several popular package managers for OS X based on open-source software that are usually ports from unix/linux systems. The popular ones include MacPorts, Homebrew, Fink and pkgsrc. Today we will be installing Homebrew and an example application matrix.
Prerequisites
Before Attempting this tutorial it is useful to have X11 and Command Line Tools installed
This tutorial was done with the following versions:
- Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
- Homebrew (Version as of 18 October 2013)
this tutorial should also work on 10.9 Mavericks.
While it's possible to have 2 package managers installed on the one system, it's not recommended. You should pick either Homebrew or MacPorts, don't install both unless you know what you're doing.
Installation
1. Open up your preferred terminal.
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| My preferred terminal - iTerm2 |
2. Copy this into it and hit enter
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"
3. Press enter to continue
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| Press enter before continuing installation |
4. Enter your password to proceed. Homebrew will install.
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| Enter your password |
5. Homebrew is now installed. It's that simple.
Brew Doctor
Homebrew comes with an awesome feature to check if there is any potential problems when using it.
Run this in your terminal to check for problems
brew doctor
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| Your System is ready to brew |
Sometimes brew doctor will give you warnings about files already in your /usr/local directory (the directory that Homebrew uses). Files can be put their based on other things you've installed on OS X. For example. I have "Paragon NTFS 9" installed on my Mac (a program that allows write access to NTFS drives) which has installed some files to the /usr/local directory. I can go ahead and ignore these warnings because I know why these files are here.
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| Brew Doctor Warnings |
Installing cmatrix
Installing applications in Homebrew is fairly easy. Write the following into your terminal:
brew install cmatrix
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| Installing an application in homebrew |
This command checks the Homebrew repository for an application called cmatrix (the repository was installed by default when you installed Homebrew) and then downloads and installs the application.
We can now run the application from the terminal, type:
cmatrix
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| The application "cmatrix" running |
End Notes
Now that you have a package manager installed you download and use thousands of applications.
