Homebrew is an up and coming successor to Fink and MacPorts. Although a bit generically named, it works quite well for a lot of the things I muck around with these days, which tend to have that web development smell to it.

It used to be that I had to get a git binary, then grab homebrew from github, then uninstall the git through the binary, and then install git through homebrew. Then, the fun would begin.

Now, it’s even more streamlined. Just grab the installer gist from the README.md page, and it should work. Although, I couldn’t get it to work and I was in a hurry, so I just grabbed the master tarball, and just physically moved the resulting /bin, /Library, and README.md.

Note: This probably worked for me because I already did everything else that was in the install script earlier, such as chmod’ing the /usr/local folder, as well as adding /usr/local/bin to the path.

Hooray for adhering to POSIX standards (Reference here: This is an awesome read, by the way, if you ever had any questions about why directories were as such in a Linux/BSD setting.).

brew install git
brew install ruby
brew install stuff

More on how brew affects Ruby on Rails installations later.