Best Package Managers for Mac

The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux). The script explains what it will do and then pauses before it does it. Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple (or your Linux system) didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local (on macOS Intel). Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like. Trivially create your own Homebrew packages. It’s all Git and Ruby underneath, so hack away with the knowledge that you can easily revert your modifications and merge upstream updates. Homebrew formulae are simple Ruby scripts. Homebrew complements macOS (or your Linux system). Install your RubyGems with gem and their dependencies with brew. Homebrew Cask installs macOS apps, fonts and plugins and other non-open source software. Making a cask is as simple as creating a formula.

Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications, Helm charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish, so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste. Charts describe even the most complex apps, provide repeatable application installation, and serve as a single point of authority. Take the pain out of updates with in-place upgrades and custom hooks. Charts are easy to version, share, and host on public or private servers. Use helm rollback to roll back to an older version of a release with ease. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A chart is a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources. A single chart might be used to deploy something simple, like a memcached pod, or something complex, like a full web app stack with HTTP servers, databases, caches, and so on.

NuGet is the package manager for .NET. The NuGet client tools provide the ability to produce and consume packages. The NuGet Gallery is the central package repository used by all package authors and consumers. New to NuGet? Start with a walkthrough showing how NuGet powers your .NET development. Browse the thousands of packages that developers like you have created and shared with the .NET community. Want to make your first NuGet package and share it with the community? Start with our walkthrough! The command-line tool, nuget.exe, builds and runs under Mono 3.2+ and can create packages in Mono. Although nuget.exe works fully on Windows, there are known issues with Linux and OS X. The primary source for learning about a package is its listing page on NuGet (or another private feed). Each package page on NuGet includes a description of the package, its version history, and usage statistics.

Yarn is a package manager which doubles down as project manager. Whether you work on one-shot projects or large monorepos, as a hobbyist or an enterprise user, we've got you covered. Split your project into sub-components kept within a single repository. Yarn guarantees that an install that works now will continue to work the same way in the future. Yarn cannot solve all your problems, but it can be the foundation for others to do it. We believe in challenging the status quo. What should the ideal developer experience be like? Yarn is an independent open-source project tied to no company. Your support makes us thrive. Yarn already knows everything there is to know about your dependency tree, it even installs it on the disk for you. So, why is it up to Node to find where your packages are? Instead, it should be the package manager's job to inform the interpreter about the location of the packages on the disk and manage any dependencies between packages and even versions of packages.

Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. Nix builds packages in isolation from each other. This ensures that they are reproducible and don't have undeclared dependencies, so if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another. Nix makes it trivial to share development and build environments for your projects, regardless of what programming languages and tools you’re using. Nix ensures that installing or upgrading one package cannot break other packages. It allows you to roll back to previous versions and ensures that no package is in an inconsistent state during an upgrade. Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell, they are built by functions that don’t have side effects, and they never change after they have been built.

A CLI workflow for the administration of macOS applications distributed as binaries. Homebrew Cask extends Homebrew and brings its elegance, simplicity, and speed to the installation and management of GUI macOS applications such as Atom and Google Chrome. We do this by providing a friendly CLI workflow for the administration of macOS applications distributed as binaries. To start using Homebrew Cask, you just need Homebrew installed. Homebrew Cask installs macOS apps, fonts and plugins, and other non-open source software. Homebrew Cask is implemented as part of Homebrew. All Homebrew Cask commands begin with brew, which works for both Casks and Formulae. The command brew install accepts one or multiple Cask tokens. Homebrew Cask comes with bash and zsh completion for the brew command. Since the Homebrew Cask repository is a Homebrew Tap, you’ll pull down the latest Casks every time you issue the regular Homebrew command brew update.

pkgsrc is a framework for managing third-party software on UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 17,900 packages. It is the default package manager of NetBSD and SmartOS and can be used to enable freely available software to be built easily on a large number of other UNIX-like platforms. The binary packages that are produced by pkgsrc can be used without having to compile anything from the source. It can be easily used to complement the software on an existing system. pkgsrc is very versatile and configurable, supporting building packages for an arbitrary installation prefix, allowing multiple branches to coexist on one machine, a build options framework, and a compiler transformation framework, among other advanced features. Unprivileged use and installation are also supported. NetBSD already contains the necessary tools for using pkgsrc; on other platforms, you need to bootstrap pkgsrc to get the package management tools installed.

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11, or Aqua-based open-source software on the Mac operating system. To that end, we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a 3-Clause BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac. We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute, without splitting them into “stable” vs. “unstable” branches, targeting mainly macOS Mojave v10.14 and later (including macOS Monterey v12 on both Intel and Apple Silicon). There are thousands of ports in our tree, distributed among different categories, and more are being added on a regular basis.

The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix open source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source. The project offers precompiled binary packages as well as a fully automated build-from-source system. Mac OS X includes only a basic set of command-line tools. Fink brings you enhancements for these tools as well as a selection of graphical applications developed for Linux and other Unix variants. With Fink the compile process is fully automated; you'll never have to worry about Makefiles or configure scripts and their parameters again. The dependency system automatically takes care that all required libraries are present.

Rudix is a build system target on macOS (formerly known as Mac OS X) with minor support to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Linux. The build system (also called "ports") provides step-by-step instructions for building third-party software, entirely from source code. Rudix provides more than a pure ports framework, it comes with packages, and precompiled software bundled up in a nice format (files *.pkg) for easy installation on your Mac. If you want to collaborate on the project, visit us at GitHub/rudix-mac or at our mirror at GitLab/rudix. Use the GitHub issue tracker to submit bugs or request features. Similar projects or alternatives to Rudix are Fink, MacPorts, pkgsrc, and Homebrew. Packages are compiled and tested on macOS Big Sur (Version 11, Intel only!), Catalina (Version 10.15) and OS X El Capitan (Version 10.11). Every package is self-contained and has everything it needs to work. The binaries, libraries, and documentation will be installed under /usr/local/.

This module is currently not in development. We are no longer accepting any pull requests to this repository. OneGet is in a stable state and is expected to receive only high-priority bug fixes from Microsoft in the future. If you have a question or are seeing an unexpected behavior from this module please open up an issue in this repository. PackageManagement is supported in Windows, Linux and MacOS now. We periodically make binary drops to PowerShellCore, meaning PackageManagement is a part of PowerShell Core releases.

A decentralized cross-platform software installation system. Works on Linux, Windows and macOS. Fully open-source. Run apps with a single click. Run applications without having to install them first. Control everything from a command line or graphical interface. You control your own computer. You don't have to guess what happens during installation. Mix and match stable and experimental apps on a single system. Anyone can distribute software. Create one package that works on multiple platforms. Publish on any static web host; no central point of control. With dependency handling and automatic updates. Security is central. Installing an app doesn't grant it administrator access. Digital signatures are always checked before new software is run. Apps can share libraries without having to trust each other. Adds automatic self-updating, staged rollouts and various improvements to desktop integration.

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from the source into easily distributable packages; installing, updating, and uninstalling packaged software; querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not; and verifying the integrity of packaged software and resulting software installation. The package’s metadata is stored in the RPM header. The header is a binary data structure that stores single pieces of data in tags. Each tag has a pre-defined meaning and data type. These are not stored in the header itself but need to be known by the code reading the header. In the header, the tags are only referred to by their number. Each tag is either of a plain scalar type or is an array of one of these types. While not enforced by the type system the RPM code assumes that tags belonging together have the same number of entries.

Package manager and build system for Fortran. There are already many packages available for use with fpm, providing an easily accessible and rich ecosystem of general-purpose and high-performance code. Fortran Package Manager (fpm) is a package manager and build system for Fortran. Its key goal is to improve the user experience of Fortran programmers. It does so by making it easier to build your Fortran program or library, run the executables, tests, and examples, and distribute it as a dependency to other Fortran projects. Fpm’s user interface is modeled after Rust’s Cargo. Its long-term vision is to nurture and grow the ecosystem of modern Fortran applications and libraries. The Fortran package manager has a plugin system that allows it to easily extend its functionality. The fpm-search project is a plugin to query the package registry. Since it is built with fpm we can easily install it on our system.

fpm is a tool that lets you easily create packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and more! fpm isn’t a new packaging system, it’s a tool to help you make packages for existing systems with less effort. It does this by offering a command-line interface to allow you to create packages easily. FPM is written in ruby and can be installed using gem. For some package formats (like rpm and snap), you will need certain packages installed to build them. Some package formats require other tools to be installed on your machine to be built; especially if you are building a package for another operating system/distribution. FPM takes your program and builds packages that can be installed easily on various operating systems. It can take any nodejs package, ruby gem, or even a python package and turn it into a deb, rpm, pacman, etc. package.

Cargo is the Rust package manager. Cargo downloads your Rust package's dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages, and uploads them to crates.io, the Rust community’s package registry. You can contribute to this book on GitHub. To get started with Cargo, install Cargo (and Rust) and set up your first crate. The commands will let you interact with Cargo using its command-line interface. A Rust crate is either a library or an executable program, referred to as either a library crate or a binary crate, respectively. Loosely, the term crate may refer to either the source code of the target or to the compiled artifact that the target produces. It may also refer to a compressed package fetched from a registry. Your crates can depend on other libraries from crates.io or other registries, git repositories, or subdirectories on your local file system. You can also temporarily override the location of a dependency.

Apache Ivy™ is a popular dependency manager focusing on flexibility and simplicity. Find out more about its unique enterprise features, what people say about it, and how it can improve your build system! Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving, and reporting) project dependencies. Ivy is essentially process agnostic and is not tied to any methodology or structure. Instead, it provides the necessary flexibility and reconfigurability to be adapted to a broad range of dependency management and build processes. While available as a standalone tool, Ivy works particularly well with Apache Ant providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging from dependency resolution to dependency reporting and publication. Ivy has a lot of powerful features, the most popular and useful being its flexibility, integration with Ant, and strong transitive dependencies management engine. Ivy is open source and released under a very permissive Apache License.

Flox is a development environment manager and package tool that lets developers define, share, and replicate consistent environments across machines by leveraging the Nix ecosystem. Flox lets you create environments via a simple manifest.toml, layering and replacing dependencies precisely where needed. It activates subshells with reproducible dependencies and integrates shell hooks, version constraints, and services (e.g., local databases) to automate setup. Because it runs on the host system (rather than inside containers), developers maintain access to files, configurations, SSH keys, and shell aliases without Docker-style bind mounts. Flox supports cross-platform and multi-architecture environments by default, allowing environments to run identically on various systems; you can constrain them to specific systems or use package groups to manage architecture-specific dependencies.

Package, dependency, and environment management for any language, Python, R, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Java, JavaScript, C/ C++, Fortran, and more. Conda is an open-source package management system and environment management system that runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and z/OS. Conda quickly installs, runs, and updates packages and their dependencies. Conda easily creates, saves, loads, and switches between environments on your local computer. It was created for Python programs, but it can package and distribute software for any language. Conda as a package manager helps you find and install packages. If you need a package that requires a different version of Python, you do not need to switch to a different environment manager, because conda is also an environment manager. With just a few commands, you can set up a totally separate environment to run that different version of Python, while continuing to run your usual version of Python in your normal environment.

Introducing tea - the revolutionary, cross-platform package manager. Say goodbye to slow & clunky, and say hello to fast & smooth. From the creator of Brew. With tea, simply type commands and it takes care of the rest. Get the latest versions of open source tools and support specific tool versions for different projects. Experience better package management with tea. And through that packaging infrastructure, we have plans of leveraging blockchain to help remunerate devs for their contributions to OSS. You can learn more about our grand ambitions for web3 by checking out our white paper here. Easily access the entire open source ecosystem with tea. Simply prefix your commands with "tea" and if the tool isn't installed, tea will install it for you. Add magic to your shell scripts and use developer environments to enhance your workflow. magic is optional; if you don’t enable it, then just prefix your commands with `tea`.