Hardscrabble 🍫

I recently learned about Homebrew Bundle, which seems to come installed when you install Homebrew, the unofficial package manager for macOS.

I had seen a Brewfile occasionally, while lurking on people’s dotfiles repos, but I didn’t quite know what it was, and assumed it was some janky third party thing.

But no, it’s an official part of homebrew¹, and it’s actually quite nice and easy to use. Here’s how I set it up in my dotfiles repo.

First, I added a file called Brewfile in the root of my dotfiles which looks like this:

brew "bat" # cat but with syntax highlighting
brew "cloc" # count lines of code
brew "emacs" # text editor that I have always meant to learn but never actually got around to
brew "fd" # find replacement

There’s more in there, but you get the gist.

I use rcm to manage my dotfiles, so I can trust that when I run rcup, it will create a symlink at ~/.Brewfile which points to this file.

Then, all I need to do is run brew bundle --no-lock --global and Homebrew Bundle will look in exactly that location (~/.Brewfile) and install the packages listed there.

Additionally, rcm has a great feature called hooks, where it will invoke some custom scripts before or after linking all your dotfiles. I decided to add a hook that will automatically run that command after it links the files. It’s pretty easy, I just created a file called hooks/post-up/brew-bundle that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -ex

brew bundle --no-lock --global

Now I can trust that every time I run rcup, I’ll install all of the packages listed in that file. I sync these dotfiles to two macOS computers (a desktop and a laptop) and so it’s very likely that I’ll add a package on one machine and then auto-install it on another.

Nice!

Shout out to Noah Portes Chaikin, whose dotfiles I was lurking on which inspired me to try this.