Homebrew FTW

I have a Macbook Air and use it for development my WordPress products. On that Macbook, I usually install a bundle of software like Google Chrome, Firefox, FileZilla, Flux, ... and a lot of development tools like Valet, PHP, Composer, MariaDB, NodeJS, ... It has been working fine until I want to remove them. Sadly there's no official way to remove them completely. I tried some utility to help but it can't work for some development tools (removing NodeJS is a nightmare!). So I searched for a better way to manage my software on Mac and I found Homebrew! It is a great tool and you should try it right now.

Homebrew is the package manager for macOS. That means it helps you to install software / tool and cares about the dependencies for you. If you're using Linux (Ubuntu for example), you know about it.

Some reasons why I love Homebrew:

• Works with command line. It automates the installation process if you have a new Macbook. I even wrote an installation script, so next time if I buy a new Macbook, I just run one command to install all the software I need.
• Keeps the log of installed software. When I want to remove them completely, I can do with a simple command.
• Some development tools are installed easier with Homebrew, for example: Composer or WP-CLI. I don't need to download or clone them from Git, then move files to usr/local/bin manually. All I need to do is running brew install wp-cli!
• It's required by Valet - my favorite development environment on Mac (it's not available on Windows!).
• It allows me to install not only development tools but also casual software like Google Chrome.

Installing Homebrew is pretty simple - just run the commands on its homepage and done!

FYI, Homebrew has 3000+ packages that you can install. If you need casual software like Google Chrome, Firefox, you can use Homebrew Cask, which has 3500+ software. That's all I (most users) want.

If you haven't used Homebrew, you should use it now. It saves you time, a lot of time!