9. Homebrew for Mac

Homebrew is a package manager, primarily for MacOS. What this means is that it provides a mechanism for easily installing a wide range of software packages. This avoids the need to click through a different set of installation options for each new package. Instead, most packages can be installed by typing a simple command such as:

$ brew install git

or, for graphical packages:

$ brew cask install visual-studio-code

You don’t strictly need Homebrew in order to install the packages you need to do your module: you can instead install each one using its graphical install process. However, you may find it easier to use Homebrew, particularly if your modules require several packages to be installed.

9.1. Installing homebrew

Open a terminal and type:

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

This will start the install process, and ask you for confirmation before installing Homebrew.

Further documentation about Homebrew and its dependencies is available on the Homebrew website.