Homebrew

Homebrew is a Ports-like packaging system for macOS.

Things I like about Homebrew

(All of these are critical criteria for third-party package management)

• Self-contained (nothing is installed outside of its installation prefix)
• Use of pre-built binaries when possible (mitigates the classic Ports-family issue of waiting forever to install something)
• Well-maintained recipes
• Attempts to not conflict with system-provided binaries
• Does not attempt to manage/replace my entire system/build environment

Things I don't like about Homebrew

• Installation instructions promote a curl | sh anti-pattern (what's wrong with a native macOS .pkg?)
• The default is to install to /usr/local, which should be reserved for user-built binaries ('managed' builds should live in /opt)
• It has a preference for granting unprivileged users wide-scale privileges (i.e., whomever runs brew needs permission to write to the installation prefix directly)
• Ridiculous terminology

How I use Homebrew

• I keep Homebrew in /opt/brew; /opt/brew/bin is in my $PATH.
• /opt/brew is owned by a _homebrew user, which is a non-privileged system account (its home directory is /var/lib/homebrew, and ensures a ~/Library tree can be written-to independently of the installation prefix or ultimately-invoking user)
• I have a sudoers file which allows execution of /opt/brew/bin/brew as _homebrew by certain users (i.e., sudo -u _homebrew -H /opt/brew/bin/brew ...
• I have a wrapper script, /usr/local/bin/brew, which appears in my $PATH before /opt/brew/bin, and which simply executes the sudo command above, passing it any supplied command-line arguments

Currently, this is managed via Puppet on my Macs, but it really should be possible to generate a signed Homebrew .pkg which does all of this from the Homebrew Github repository via Travis

Caveats

Installing somewhere than /usr/local is not recommended by Homebrew. My use-cases mean I've yet to run into any issues.

I will tend to install upstream native packages in preference to Homebrew builds where available (e.g., Puppet, pandoc, Node, Python, etc.)