How to Install Homebrew on Mac (and Why You’ll Want It)
If you ever used winget or Chocolatey on Windows to install software from the command line instead of hunting for installer .exe files, Homebrew is the direct Mac equivalent — and it’s more central to the Mac developer/power-user ecosystem than either of those are on Windows. A huge number of tools, especially anything development-adjacent, assume you already have it.
What it actually is
Homebrew is a package manager: a command-line tool that installs, updates, and removes software by name, pulling from a huge community-maintained catalog. Instead of downloading a .dmg, dragging an icon to Applications, and manually checking for updates later, you run one command and it’s handled — installation, and later, updates, all from Terminal.
Installing it
Open Terminal (Spotlight: ⌘+Space, type “Terminal”) and paste this, exactly as published on brew.sh — always check the official site for the current command rather than copying it from an old blog post, since Homebrew occasionally updates the installer:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
It’ll ask for your password (this is normal — it needs to create a few system directories) and walk you through the rest. On Apple Silicon Macs, it installs to /opt/homebrew; on Intel Macs, /usr/local. The installer will tell you if you need to add it to your shell’s PATH — usually one more command it prints for you to copy-paste.
Using it
Once installed, the whole interface is a handful of commands:
brew install <package> # install something
brew uninstall <package> # remove it
brew update # update Homebrew itself
brew upgrade # upgrade everything you've installed
brew list # see what you've installed
A few genuinely useful examples: brew install wget, brew install git, brew install --cask visual-studio-code. That --cask flag matters — Homebrew has two catalogs. Plain brew install handles command-line tools; brew install --cask handles full GUI applications (the ones you’d normally drag into Applications). If a regular install fails with “no formulae found” for something you know is an app, try it again with --cask.
Why it’s worth the setup
The honest case for Homebrew isn’t that it’s dramatically faster than downloading an installer once — it’s that it removes the manual-update problem entirely. brew upgrade on its own catches every tool you’ve installed this way in one pass, instead of you remembering to check a dozen different apps’ “Check for Updates” menus individually.
It’s also just the expected way to install a huge swath of developer and power-user tools on Mac — READMEs across GitHub routinely say “run brew install x” as the first step, no further explanation given, because it’s assumed you have it.
A note if you’re coming from AppleScript or automation work
Homebrew installs command-line tools, but it’s not itself a scripting or automation tool — it’s how you get the tools you’ll automate around (jq for JSON, ffmpeg for video, imagemagick for images, and hundreds more). If what you’re actually after is automating repetitive Mac tasks — file organization, batch renaming, that kind of thing — that’s more AppleScript’s territory than Homebrew’s, and it doesn’t require Terminal at all. Scriptly generates working AppleScript from a plain-English description if you’d rather skip writing it by hand.
Homebrew is a one-time, ten-minute setup that quietly saves time for as long as you use the Mac afterward — worth doing even if you don’t yet know exactly what you’ll install with it.