2024-04-01

Homebrew provides hundreds of Open Source Unix tools compiled for OS X, free. It can be used to install Perl, Ruby, Go, and MySQL.

Homebrew is an alternative to Macports. In September 2021, I tried to reinstall MacPorts Perl, MySQL, and CPAN on Big Sur. It failed trying to install DBD::mysql. I was tired of this problem. I switched from Macports to Homebrew. Guess what? Still had the problem. I overcame it again after two days' work. But going forward, Homebrew looks like it will be easier to use.

See below for some gotchas.

Installing Homebrew

Here are instructions for setting up a 64-bit Homebrew, tested September 2021 on macOS 11.6 Big Sur.

Ventura

In February 2023 I installed homebrew on macOS 13.2 Ventura.

On 13.2, homebrew uses the prefix /opt/homebrew instead of /usr/local. I corrected my PERL5LIB to be $HOME/bin:/opt/homebrew/lib/perl5/5.36:/opt/homebrew/Cellar/perl/5.36.0/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.36 and linked /usr/local/bin/perl to /opt/homebrew/bin/perl so I didn't have to mention /opt in any shebang lines.

Sonoma

In March 2024 I installed macOS 14.4 Sonoma. I tried some homebrew programs and they worked OK, so I did not reinstall Homebrew. Then I unwisely did a brew update ImageMagick and that broke a lot of programs: reinstalling Perl discarded all my CPAN modules. I had to reinstall them, and re-setup MySQL. Had some trouble getting DBD::mysql to install, and more work downgrading xz-utils to unhack it.

Instructions

• Install Xcode from the App Store (free from Apple).
• Install the Xcode command line tools: in a Terminal window, type sudo xcode-select --install. (In Ventura, this queues a request to install them, and then you do the actual install with App Store.)
• From https://docs.brew.sh/Installation, copy and paste the installation command line into Terminal.
• Installing Homebrew will alter your .bash_profile to add /opt/homebrew/bin and /opt/homebrew/sbin to your PATH.
• Now you can do brew install xxx for all the modules you want. The ones I installed are
  • ImageMagick ... this drags in a lot of prerequisite packages including Ghostscript and Perl.
  • uni2ascii
  • psutils
  • graphviz
  • rsync ... Big Sur comes with 2.6.9, Homebrew installs 3.2.7
  • wget
  • gnuplot ... See this repair story. installs qt and lua
  • poppler needed for pdftotext
  • exiftool ... manage metadata in .jpg files
  • cpanminus ... quick install of CPAN files
  • go ... Golang
  • ruby ... Ruby
  • mysql ... MySQL ... secure it, remove test database, etc
• If you have upgraded Perl, you may need to re-install all your CPAN modules.

Installing Perl via Homebrew will create /usr/local/bin/perl as a symlink to the Homebrew version of Perl in /usr/local/Cellar/perl/5.34.0/bin/perl. Install this before updating CPAN, and make sure that all library Perl programs and modules use #!/usr/local/bin/perl as their "shebang" line. (The reason for this complexity is that you can't change /usr/bin due to System Integrity Protection.)

There are a few programs that I don't use Homebrew for... one is HTML Tidy, which I install into /usr/local/bin from http://binaries.html-tidy.org/.

Ventura

Installation went very smoothly. Afterwards, the "brew" command was not found... doing eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" fixed it, but why... this command is in .bash_profile.

I used Homebrew to install MySQL. This was easier than using Oracle's site. One one machine, I ran into problems starting mysql.. see my MySQL page, but I found a fix.

Python, Perl, and Ruby

Apple announced that in versions of macOS after Catalina, they will not provide Python, Perl, or Ruby. (This turned out not to be true: Big Sur came with all three. Perl in Big Sur is 5.30; Homebrew installed 5.36.)

OS	lang	OS version	Homebrew version
Ventura	perl	5.30	5.36
BigSur	perl	5.30	5.36
Ventura	python3	3.9.6	3.11
BigSur	python	3.8.9	-
Ventura	ruby	2.6.10p210	-
BigSur	ruby	2.6.10p210	3.2.3p185

Links I set up in /usr/local

In order to make some scripts work, I set up some links in /usr/local

• perl@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/perl
• mysql@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/mysql
• mysqldump@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/mysqldump
• convert@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/convert
• mogrify@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/mogrify

I also install some programs directly info /usr/local from their websites.

• HTML tidy
• Aquamacs

Big Sur

I had a terrible mess installing and using Homebrew on Big Sur. I spent 2 days getting things to work.

I used PERL5LIB=/Users/myname/bin:/opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.22 and linked /usr/bin/perl to /opt/local/bin/perl to ensure that the correct version is invoked (had to temporarily disable SIP). [I think I should have linked /usr/local/bin/perl to /opt/homebrew/bin/perl instead.] I also set up my bash configuration to do

    export PERL5LIB=$HOME/bin:/opt/local/lib/perl5/5.22
    export PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT="/opt/local/lib/perl5/5.22"
    export PERL_MB_OPT="--install_base "/opt/local/lib/perl5/5.22""
    export PERL_MM_OPT="INSTALL_BASE=/opt/local/lib/perl5/5.22"

Installing Libraries and Commands

If you are installing Homebrew for the first time, you may need to remove old junk from /usr/local. If you are stopping the use of Macports, you may need to remove or rename /opt/local so you don't end up with old versions.

First thing to do is to install Perl. type sudo brew install Perl.

After you have done this, /usr/local/bin/perl should exist and link to the correct version of Perl. Your shebang lines should point there.

Next do sudo brew install xxx for all the modules you want. The ones I installed are

• ImageMagick ... this drags in a lot of prerequisite packages including ghostscript.
• uni2ascii
• psutils
• graphviz ... installs Python
• rsync ... Mavericks, El Capitan, and Sierra come with 2.6.9, MacPorts installs 3.1.2
• wget
• gnuplot ... See this repair story.
• poppler needed for pdftotext
• exiftool ... manage metadata in .jpg files
• libmaxminddb ... Needed for MaxMind Perl modules

I didn't install HTML tidy from Homebrew: it installs version 5.4.0. Use https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5 instead, which installs version 5.9.12. (Install cmake with Homebrew, and then download the ZIP file from GitHub and build and install tidy.)

Installing Perl modules from CPAN

I installed Perl modules using the cpan command provided by Homebrew.

• Ensure your shell environment exports ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64"
• Ensure your shell environment exports VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=no to avoid errors from dyld
• Ensure your shell environment exports PERL5LIB and points to the Perl libraries you want CPAN to update.

Things I do not install with Homebrew

There are a few modules I don't install with Homebrew. Some of these, like HTML Tidy and Aquamacs, are installed directly into /usr/local/bin

A few modules installed by Homebrew should be linked from /usr/local/bin: because of how tools invoke them.

  $ls -l /usr/local/bin
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1970144 Jul 21  2021 tidy*
  lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel       25 Feb 22  2023 convert@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/convert
  lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel       25 Feb 22  2023 mogrify@ -> /opt/homebrew/bin/mogrify
  -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel      993 Apr 10  2023 aquamacs*
  -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel    78032 Apr 10  2023 emacsclient*
  lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel       51 Apr 10  2023 emacs@ -> /Applications/Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacs

Installing MySQL

I didn't install MySQL using Homebrew. I did it using the Oracle site. Seemed to work.