Homebrew is essentially a package manager for programs running on Mac OS. Think of it as the app store but you download everything from your command line.
A Brewfile is a script that lists a project’s ‘dependencies’ (or programs/tools it needs to run) to be downloaded from Homebrew.
To use it, simply add a Brewfile in the root directory of your project, include the brew packages you want to install, and run brew bundle in a terminal in that directory. It will then go through all the brew commands and run each one.
For example, say I have a Brewfile with the following contents:
#install git
brew "git"
#install nvm
brew "nvm"
# gets cask fonts repo and installs font-menlo-for-powerline font
tap "homebrew/cask-fonts"
cask "font-menlo-for-powerline"When we run brew bundle:
- The lines with a
#are comments and are skipped. - The lines with
breware downloaded and installed. In this case we install Git and NVM. - The line with
tapmakes a clone of thehomebrew/cask-fontsrepo, and allows you to get certain fonts withcask <font>
Once these bundles have installed, they are ready for use in your project.