The Chalkboard

Robert Hawdon's Knowledge Base

Homebrew

Last Updated: [2023-03-31 Fri 22:49]

Getting Started

Firstly, before you can do anything, you'll need to actually install Homebrew. So head on over to the Homebrew website and follow the instructions there:

https://brew.sh

Getting Down to Business

Right, now you have Homebrew installed, here’s pretty much the missing manual of things you can install on your Mac, and why the Mac is so much better than the PC:

Firstly, you’re going to want a better terminal application, because the built in one for the Mac is not great. iTerm2 is generally what’s used here. You can either install it the “traditional way” (i.e. downloading the DMG from iterm2.com and drag the application to the applications directory. But that’s slow. We can have Homebrew install it for us using Casks. Casks are Homebrew's terminology for pre-packaged applications that are available to download as a DMG or PKG. These days, the brew command will check if a cask is available if it couldn't find an application in its main repository.

brew install iterm2

Other applications that can be installed this way are: vlc, firefox, postman, as well as many others.

However, that’s not the primary purpose of Homebrew. What it’s mainly used for is a way to get applications you’d generally find on Linux easily installed on the macOS platform. In most cases these are terminal applications (hence the need for a better terminal), and a lot of these you’ll find more useful to have installed locally.

Here’s a list of a few applications to get you started:

To install each of these, use the following command:

brew install APPLICATION

obviously replacing APPLICATION with the actual application

Software list

Essentials

These are pretty much required to do your job.

git - A version control system we use to manage the source code at Bede - Note: You don't need to install this as Homebrew requires git to work so it'll already be installed. However, you can install the latest version of git via homebrew if you wish.
wget - A download manager. When retrieving files from the internet, it’s generally easier to use wget than to use curl and pipe the output to a file.
hub - An extension to git from github. It adds a few nice commands that makes your github life a bit easier. The official documentation shows you how to set up an alias so you can use it as the git command: https://github.com/github/hub/blob/master/README.md
coreutils - A lot of the tools you’d usually find on Linux systems. This includes md5sum and sha1sum which are requirements for Terraform.
jq - A tool for parsing JSON files, it’s a bit complicated to use, but it’s great for using in script files.
azure-cli - The Azure cross platform command line.

Nice to haves

Not required for your job, but will make your life a lot easier.

python-yq - A tool that does nothing more than take a YAML file (like we use in Puppet), convert it to JSON and pass it into jq. All the power of jq but with yaml files. This also installs xq which does exactly the same, but for XML files.
htop - A great tool to see what’s using up system resources.
redis - This will install Redis on your machine locally, you’ll probably never need the server component itself, but it also installs redis-cli which you may need in the future.
shellcheck - You’re eventually going to need to write shell scripts, shellcheck is good for checking the syntax of your scripts.
icdiff - An alternative to diff with split screen and colouring.
sponge - "reads standard input and writes it out to the specified file. Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before opening the output file. This allows constricting pipelines that read from and write to the same file."
powershell - Microsoft Powershell is now cross platform. It can be useful, espeically for interacting with Azure, though these days, most things are covered by the azure-cli.

Optional

Again, will make your life easier, however these are more a personal preference.

vim - The Vim text editor. It’s generally kept more up to date than the version bundled with macOS, however, once installed, you need to run the follwing to override the built in version:

brew link vim

It’s a bit of a learning curve, but worth learning as you can bet pretty much any Linux server you’re going to log into will have vim installed (or at least vi).

zsh - An alternative to bash, a few of us use it here, but I’d recommend really getting to know bash before looking into zsh. Again, pretty much any Linux server you’re going to log into will have bash. You can get a very powerful zsh set up with Oh My Zsh: https://ohmyz.sh/
mc - Midnight Commander, a file manager based on Norton Commander.
lsd - LSDeluxe, an alternative to ls which displays icons next to files and colourises the output.
imagemagick - A powerful command line tool for resizing/converting images.
ffmpeg - A tool for working with video/audio.
neovim - An alternative to Vim but aims to be compatible whilst being more light weight and supporting Lua plugins.
bottom - A more pretty alternaltive to top or htop, to run this, use the btm command.

Experimental

Here be dragons. Totally not required for your job, but I personally use.

The tools here aren’t in the main Homebrew repos, but are provided by taps. Homebrew’s system for 3rd party software.

emacs - Another text editor, seen by some as a rival to Vim (Though you can install Evil Mode to make it act like Vim, frameworks such as Spacemacs or Doom Emacs include Evil mode by default and allow you to easily expand on your Emacs experience) - It’s best to install a modified version of Emacs specially built for macOS called emacs-plus:

brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
brew install emacs-plus --with-elrumo2-icon

The --with-elrumo2-icon option simply builds emacs with a macOS Big Sur+ square icon which fits in better with the rest of the system. If you're indenting to use Spacemacs, you may want to use the --with-spacemacs-icon option instead, however it's only available as a round icon.

One of the benefits of Emacs is Org Mode. Also, Emacs has Magit, one of the most powerful frontends for Git, which can be extended to work with Github and Gitlab using magit-forge.

dfshow - DF-SHOW, A file and directory browser, when installed you get two commands: show and sf. Show is designed to emulate the look and feel of the ls -l command whilst also being interactive. SF is a simple file viewer which can be used to read text files.

brew tap roberthawdon/dfshow
brew install dfshow

Upgrading packages

Finally, it’s worth keeping your packages updated.

Running the following commands will keep your packages up to date (in the case of Casks, only if the Cask has been set up to allow upgrading via Homebrew, for cases like Firefox, you'll be required to upgrade those within the applications themselves)

brew upgrade