tilBrewfile

I’m a huge fan of brew. I use it for installing a broad list of command line tools, as well as Mac apps. Most apps you use can be installed with brew install --cask. However, where I’ve found Brew most helpful is as a lightweight way to set up new computers with all the apps and utilities I rely on. To do this, I use Brewfile.

This is brew’s equivalent of a package.json or Gemfile, it’s just a list of all software that should be installed. To get started quickly run brew bundle and to learn more, see the Homebrew/homebrew-bundle repo.

However, keeping the Brewfile up to date as new things are installed does not happen automatically. Here are a few additional things I do:

• I keep my .Brewfile in my homedir, and track it as part of my dotfiles.

• I use brew alias to keep commonly used commands and their arguments terse. The most important being brew add which is a replacement for brew install which also updates the Brewfile, brew remove replacing brew uninstall and brew sync which installs anything new after pulling dotfiles changes from another machine. You can see all of these scripts which I also include in my dotfiles repo.

The final result is that setting up a new machine with a list of apps I use is pretty easy, as is keeping that install base the same across a few computers I use. Brew alias makes it easy to keep everything correct.

For personal machines, this has been much more simple and useable than Vagrant, Ansible, or other more professional environment management tool.