Setting up a new computer with Homebrew

This page is part of my digital garden. It is more like a notebook entry than a polished blog post. It's a space where I document learnings primarily for my own reference, yet share them in case they benefit others. Unlike my blog posts, these pages are works-in-progress and updated over time. Like tending to a real garden, I periodically refine its content. I welcome suggestions for improvements at dries@buytaert.net.

Setting up a new computer can be a lot of work, but I've made it much simpler with Homebrew, a popular package manager.

Creating a list of installed software

As a general rule, I prefer to install all software on my Mac using Homebrew. I always try Homebrew first and only resort to downloading software directly from websites if it is not available through Homebrew.

Homebrew manages both formulae and casks. Casks are typically GUI applications, while formulae are command-line tools or libraries.

First, I generate a list of all manually installed packages on my old computer:

$ brew leaves

The brew leaves command displays only the packages you installed directly using Homebrew. It excludes any packages that were installed automatically as dependencies. To view all installed packages, including dependencies, you can use the brew list command.

To save this list to a file:

$ brew leaves > brews.txt

Next, I include installed casks in the same list:

$ brew list --cask >> brews.txt

This appends the cask list to brews.txt, giving me a complete list of all the packages I've explicitly installed.

Reviewing your packages

It is a good idea to check if you still need all packages on your new computer. I review my packages as follows:

$ cat brews.txt | xargs brew desc --eval-all

This command provides a short description for each package in your list.

Installing your packages on a new machine

Transfer your brews.txt file to the new computer, install Homebrew, and run:

$ xargs brew install < brews.txt

This installs all the packages listed in your file.