Installing Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OSX itself (so like NPM but up a level). It's a tool that provides similar tooling for OSX as has been standard for a long time in Linux (for example apt-get for Debian/Ubuntu or yum for Red Hat based systems).

It in theory provides a clean way of installing or uninstalling packages of software from the command line; the advantage of this is that it's trivial then to automate. Typically this software is in the realm of software development tools, but any software can be configured to be installed in this way, and installation recipes can be published by anyone.

Installing Homebrew

Execute the following horrible looking command from a terminal. It is slightly dirty doing this as it's basically running an arbitrary script that you are downloading from a remote machine, so if you are suitably paranoid you should go inspect the script first to make sure it's not going to replace all your data with pictures of Putin looking manly.

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