• Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t.

    $ brew install wget

  • Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local.

    $ cd /usr/local $ find Cellar Cellar/wget/1.12 Cellar/wget/1.12/bin/wget Cellar/wget/1.12/share/man/man1/wget.1  $ ls -l bin bin/wget -> ../Cellar/wget/1.12/bin/wget

  • Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

  • Trivially create your own Homebrew packages.

    $ brew create http://foo.com/bar-1.0.tgz Created /usr/local/Library/Formula/bar.rb

  • It's all git and ruby underneath, so hack away with the knowledge that you can easily revert your modifications and merge upstream updates.

    $ brew edit wget # opens in $EDITOR!

  • Homebrew formula are simple Ruby scripts:

    require 'formula'  class Wget < Formula   homepage 'http://www.gnu.org/wget/'   url 'http://ftp.gnu.org/wget-1.12.tar.gz'   md5 '308a5476fc096a8a525d07279a6f6aa3'    def install     system "./configure --prefix=#{prefix}"     system 'make install'   end end