Has everybody here heard of Home Brew, it is a Linux based package manager for your Mac. Also, it offers a tone of great terminal based software.
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I use brew frequently! As always though, we need to find an automation angle that’s friendly to a good chunk of our audience 
Well… I do have a script that I use via launchd to keep brew up to date, but that’s definitely not an entire show.
However, now that it also has the ability to automate app installations too, I suppose it could be part of a “Setting up a new Mac” automation show?
Could also do a show (or part thereof) about some of the tools it includes that can help with automation, such as:
- blueutil for controlling Bluetooth
- brightness I bet you can guess what this one does
- contacts which I use to remind myself of friends’ birthdays
- dropbox-uploader will not only upload to Dropbox but get you a share link
- html2text for trying to convert HTML to markdown
- icalBuddy which is handy for getting calendar info into scripts
- jq for dealing with json
- lynx which is awesome for processing web pages in scripts
- mas for installing Mac App Store apps from the command line.
- multimarkdown for making markdown into HTML
- pdfgrep for searching for text inside PDFs
- rsync is great for sending files to other computers and is much more up-to-date than the version that ships with macOS
- tag, for, well, tagging (I use that with some automated scripts and Hazel)
- terminal-notifier which is like Growl but for Notification Center
- trash (which is the best way to “delete” files with shell scripts and also supports the “Put Back” feature of the Trash)
- wget which is great for downloading files
- wifi-password for getting the password to your current Wi-Fi network
- youtube-dl for downloading from YouTube and lots of other sites
Just some ideas.
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At work we use Homebrew in Chef recipes to automatically set up new build slaves (Mac mini’s) to exactly the state we want.
But I guess this is only interesting to a very small group of people.
At home & work I additionally use Homebrew without Chef to install tools and keep them (semi-automatically) up-to-date on my own machines.
I just tried:
It’s pretty cool!
it’s a deployment platform.
Almost the entirety of the setup of a new computer occurs for me through a Brewfile. I use brew but it’s also great to be able to use brew cask and mas to install/update almost every GUI app I have on my computer.
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Sorry, I thought I had used a proper link to their website in my post, but apparently the “protocol” (http/https) was missing (fixed it now).
It’s indeed a deployment platform.
Are there other package managers, command line apps, or command line tips and tricks that I should be aware of? Homebrew was a first for me and I absolutely love it. At first, I only used it to install a DRM remover patch for Handbrake for my own movies only.
What do you do to set up a new computer? Can you explain further or do you have a blog post about how to set up the Mac completely with Command Line Terminal?
I’ve put a blog post together here. But essentially, I’m leveraging https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle and https://github.com/lra/mackup/
Also interesting https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos
Not really. There is Mac Ports but Homebrew is better in a number of ways, and I’m not sure of any reason to use two of package managers.
Home Brew is essential if you use a lot of open source packages. It’s not Linux based, although it emulates the huge software libraries that Linux distributions tend to have. (Pet Peeve: people who think that the unix underpinnings of macOS mean that macOS is based on Linux rather than the BSD unix variants.)
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I’m not using a Mac anymore so I wouldn’t make a good guest to discuss the topic but when I was a Mac user I wrote this script to help me take an out of the box MacBook Air to a fully ready to go laptop with everything I wanted installed.
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I missed this post when it was new.