Homebrew Commands

Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS, very much like apt is a package manager for Ubuntu/Debian Linux.

It lets you install, update, upgrade and uninstall programs via the command line. It also let’s you install some Linux programs for your Mac, like wget for example.

Homebrew also let’s you add programs to launchd so that they automatically start and restart with login. For example brew services start mongodb

install Homebrew with this command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Commands

Command Description
brew install foo Install package
brew upgrade foo Upgrade package
brew unlink foo Unlink (removes symlinks, e.g. before upgrades)
brew link foo Link
brew switch foo 2.5.0 Change versions
brew list --versions foo See what versions you have
brew info foo Get info about package, List versions, caveats, etc
brew cleanup foo Remove old versions
brew edit foo Edit this formula
brew home foo Open homepage
brew update Update brew and cask
brew list List installed
brew outdated What’s due for upgrades?
brew --cellar Shows the path for Cellar directory

Upgrade a package:

brew unlink foo and then brew upgrade foo