This week I had to set up a new machine for work. My old one was barely limping along having to be constantly tethered to a wall socket these past three years. I always find it interesting setting up something new. It’s amazing how many apps and files can gather over time. I had apps that I’d used for one specific thing years ago, just sitting there taking up space. Visual Studio Code was filled with plugins/extensions that I don’t remember ever installing or using.
But the most important thing was that, initially, I’d had admin/sudo access on my old Mac. I’d installed various apps through Homebrew over time. Don’t know what Homebrew is? Well, it’s simply a package manager for MacOS (and Linux if you want). Need to run Go on your Mac, you can go to the Go homepage, find the correct download and install it yourself…or just install Homebrew and type brew install go. When you need to update it, you simply brew update && brew upgrade. No need to find installation packages yourself if you can use Homebrew to do it instead. And that one update and upgrade command will update everything Homebrew has installed, no more having to individually update apps.
Once admin access had been removed, I found that I was unable to update some Homebrew apps without having to raise tickets with IT. This left me with a year old install of Powershell, a two year old install of Dotnet that had broken at some point, etc. Not an ideal situation, but I could live with it.
Now with the new Mac, I was starting without admin access at all. So the first question I had was “How can I install Homebrew without sudo?”. A bit of digging around and I found an answer. You can clone the repo into a location of your choosing and then set up some environment variables and cross your fingers. Homebrew writes into /usr/local or /opt/homebrew or /home/linuxbrew.linuxbrew (apparently the type of machine determines which). You need to have sudo to be able to create the directories/files in those locations, so if you can’t supply a valid password, the install will fail. If you set the HOMEBREW_PREFIX environment variable, this is used instead of those prefixes.
Here are the commands I used:
xcode-select --install
git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/brew homebrew
export "HOMEBREW_PREFIX=/Users/p/opt/homebrew" >> ~/.zshrc
export "PATH=$PATH:/Users/p/homebrew/bin:$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/bin" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
brew update
After that, Homebrew was on my Mac - no sudo needed. There is a warning that installing like this is unsupported on the Homebrew installation page. But we all know that we ignore stuff like that until something goes wrong…who can be bothered to RTFM?
Note that the installs do seem to take longer than before - looks like the source is downloaded and then built on your machine rather than using prebuilt binaries…not that brew was ever that fast to begin with.