Homebrew Applications

— 2 minute read

After you‘ve got to grips with Homebrew to install packages, you can also use brew to install applications. First find the applications you are looking for;

brew search docker
brew search firefox
brew search visual-studio-code

These are under “casks”, so you would install them using the following;

brew cask install docker firefox visual-studio-code

This means that instead of browsing to each application website, downloading the application and either dragging it to the Applications folder or running the installer, you simply use brew to install it.

Mac App Store

You can even install your Mac App Store applications. First you will need to install the mas package which allows you to manage these;

brew install mas

Next, you need to sign in to your Apple account;

mas signin firstname.lastname@example.com

Then you can search and install the applications in a very similar way as before. One change is the mas needs the ID to install application. These can be found when searching;

mas search 1password
# 1333542190 1Password 7  - Password Manager (7.3.1)
mas install 1333542190

You can even use the mas package to check which applications are outdated and easily upgrade them;

mas outdated
mas upgrade
# Upgrading 2 outdated applications

Now, when you‘re setting up your new computer, you can easily install all your required packages and applications incredibly quickly. You can even speed things up more, by creating a script which installs everything you need.

You can see examples of two scripts I have used;