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What are the best Mac package managers?

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Package managers help install, update, remove and configure software packages.

A good Mac package manager should be easy to use, fast, reliably up to date, as unintrusive as possible, require as little dependencies as possible, and not require root privileges.

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The Best 1 of 8 OptionsWhy?

8 Options ConsideredPriceLast Updated
The Best
Homebrew
Apr 5, 2018
Homebrew Cask
Mar 5, 2018
Nix package manager
Mar 5, 2018
Conda
Mar 5, 2018
pkgsrc
Mar 31, 2018
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The Best

Homebrew

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thermoplastics
Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Quick access to a large repository of open source software

•••
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
thermoplastics
Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Easy to setup and use

•••
Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Krrny
Top Pro

Unintrusive

•••
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Builds are quick and requires few dependencies

•••
Homebrew uses already existing libraries and tools as much as possible to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Recipes are simple and easy to use

•••
The recipes themselves are Ruby scripts and are small, simple to understand and easy to create and modify.
thermoplastics
Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Does not require using sudo

•••
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Little maintenance needed

•••
In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland.
Andris Pelcbergs
Reza Qorbani
Top Pro

Great community support

•••
Timothy
Top Pro

Well documented

•••
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Tool for easily finding packages available

•••
Braumeister is an easy to use online tool used for browsing Homebrew packages.
Tom Maiaroto
Top Con

Annoying for updates

•••
Super annoying for upgrades when OS X updates or when some formulas do. It's a pretty janky system (perhaps the formula's problems more than homebrew itself), despite being super convenient. There are many occasions where you simply don't want to upgrade things out of fear of wasting ho...
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions

•••
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other t...
See 7 more ProsSee 10 more Pros & Cons
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7 Other Options Considered

Homebrew Cask

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Laura Kyle
sebf
Top Pro

Manage graphical applications through the command line

•••
Homebrew Cask allows you to install graphical applications through the command line, rather than having to go through the standard installation process. E.g. brew cask install google-chrome
thermoplastics
Laura Kyle
sebf
Top Pro

Extends Homebrew

•••
Homebrew Cask adds functionality to Homebrew such as allowing downloads of commercial licensed apps.
thermoplastics
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Active project

•••
The project is very active, with commits almost daily and plenty of conversation in issues. This means that the app will see bugs fixed and possibly new features added.
thermoplastics
Top Con

Duplicate apps found in brew may cause issue

•••
There are warnings provided that apps found in brew should not be installed with brew cask (and vice versa). While the user is warned of this, mistakes can happen, which would be better to just see them avoided all together by not supplying duplicate apps.
thermoplastics
Laura Kyle
Top Con

Requires Xcode

•••
Homebrew Cask requires that Xcode is installed, which may be more work than what some want to spend on configuring this app.
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons

Nix package manager

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thermoplastics
yorik.sar
Top Pro

You always and atomically get an isolated consistent profile

•••
Every time you install, delete or change anything you get a new fresh copy of your user environment (set of symlinks to files in /nix/store) that's stored in the same /nix/store and handled mostly the same way. Your "profile" (symlink to one of environments) is updated after everythi...
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Can keep around several profiles for you to use

•••
You can have different (probably overlapping) sets of software installed in two or more profiles that will be handled (changed, versioned, upgraded, reverted) independently. All software will be installed in the same /nix/store, so any overlaps between your sets will be physically installed only on...
yorik.sar
Top Pro

It's easy to revert any change in your environment

•••
Every time your profile changes, you get a new generation of your profile and older generations are kept around, so you can easily (and atomically) revert to older version of your profile.
Endi Sukaj
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Packages don't change after they are built

•••
Nix treats packages like values in a functional language. Since they are built by functions without side effects they never change after they are built.
Endi Sukaj
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Packages installed with Nix don't overlap with packages installed in /usr/local

•••
Since packages are stored in the /nix directory, it won't overlap with anything you'd install in /usr/local or wherever else.
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Does not require root priviledges

•••
Everything is owned by your user (unless you use more powerful multiuser mode that doesn't require root either).
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Uses binary caches (that are provided) so you don't have to build anything locally

•••
Due to its functional nature, it can just download a binary package with the same hash if its available and it'll get the very same package as you'd build locally (to the last bit that is).
thermoplastics
Endi Sukaj
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Easy to install

•••
Requires just one shell script to install, only one directory is created via sudo. This makes for a pretty simple install method that most can grasp.
yorik.sar
Top Pro

Very easy to share compiled binaries between machines

•••
You can share packages via HTTP or SSH (push or pull) with just some simple commands.
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions

•••
While the functional approach that Nix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions. Especially in Debia...
See 8 more ProsSee 8 more Pros

Conda

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thermoplastics
David Ketcheson
Top Pro

Binary installs

•••
They are fast and reliable as they do not need to compile before installation.
David Ketcheson
Top Pro

Allows for multiple environments

•••
It is great for developers since you can easily switch between complete environments with different versions of packages, for testing and development.
David Ketcheson
Top Pro

Open source

•••
Conda is open source and on Github, so if you see something wrong you can fix it and submit a patch.
David Ketcheson
Top Con

Doesn't have everything

•••
Conda is relatively new and has a smaller user-base, so the set of packages available is limited.
thermoplastics
Top Con

No way to resume downloads

•••
Any download that is canceled or interrupted will have to be started over from the beginning as there is no built in solution for resuming downloads.
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons

pkgsrc

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Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

pkgin is an apt-like tools for installing binaries from pkgsrc

•••
pkgin aims to be a tool similar to apt/yum for managing pkgsrc binaries by relying on pkg_summary for installing, removing and upgrading packages and dependencies, using a remote repo.
DebonairJulana
Top Pro

Works easily with Ansible

•••
Can be used from within Ansible to install packages on macOS.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Offering tooling for backporting fixes

•••
Backporting fixes can be done by cherry-picking updates from a newer branch (pkgsrc is released every 3 months) and creating a package. Sometimes bugs need to be fixed for production and there is neither a fix in newer pkgsrc nor the softwares upstream. So pkgsrc has tools like pkgdiff, mkpatches,...
Andris Pelcbergs
SW
Top Pro

Both binary packages and source build possible

•••
Fast software installation is possible by using binary packages. It's also easy to build from source which allows for different compile-time options (like different UI backends) as well as gaining access to pre-release versions of software in certain cases.
Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Adapted for use on over a dozen different operating systems

•••
Has been adopted to be used on several Unix-like operating systems and Windows. It's also the default package manager of DragonflyBSD and of the (now discounted) Bluewall Linux distro.
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

Relatively complicated setup and installation

•••
Installing and setting pkgsrc up is a bit more complicated than in other package managers where it often consists in running a single script.
See 4 more ProsSee 4 more Pros

MacPorts

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Andris Pelcbergs
Bryan
Top Pro

Provides a consistent experience across OS X versions

•••
MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own making sure that the experience is the same regardless of what OS X version is used.
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Generally very up to date

•••
MacPorts generally gets new software soon after it's available. This way users will not have to worry if their software is up to date.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Nice variants system

•••
MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Downloads unneeded libraries duplicating functionality already provided by Apple's libraries

•••
As MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own a large duplication of functionality across MacPorts and Apple libraries can be found.
Andris Pelcbergs
Bryan
Top Con

Bad at limiting dependencies

•••
MacPorts has a habit of pulling very specific versions of dependencies for each package. It downloads different version of already existing dependencies even in cases where the existing dependency version would have worked seamlessly.
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons

Rudix

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thermoplastics
Top Pro

Statically linked packages

•••
Using statically liked packages allows each package to contain all of the dependencies it needs, this way the user just installs to then use the app. No muss no fuss.
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Very easy and fast

•••
Installing and removing packages is very easy, fast and painless thanks to using binary installs.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Lacks man files for installed packages

•••
The man files for tools are not installed with the binaries.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Not sandboxed

•••
Binaries go directly to /usr/bin, so they are not sandboxed.
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Not many packages

•••
Although Rudix is in development since 2005, there's a distinct lack of packages available. This limits the usefulness of the package manager for the user.
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons

Fink

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Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Packages provided as binaries

•••
Installed applications don't need to be compiled and built on the system.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Will be familiar to apt-get users

•••
Fink is based on apt-get making the transition to anyone used to Debian-based environments easier.
HumorousGwydion
Top Pro

Install from source

•••
thermoplastics
Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Pre-compiled packages are often out of date

•••
It happens often that the user will come across out of date, pre-compiled packages. This can impede on using new features released in apps due to using older releases.
See 2 more ProsSee 2 more Pros

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Works flawlessly and very easily as well. Holds true to the simple as possible philosophy of Mac.
Pro
 Easy to setup and use
Pro
 Builds are quick and requires few dependencies
Pro
 Recipes are simple and easy to use
Pro
 Unintrusive
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 Does not require using sudo
Pro
 Quick access to a large repository of open source software
Pro
 Little maintenance needed
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 Tool for easily finding packages available
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