What are the best Mac package managers?

Question

8

Options
Considered

385

User
Recs.

Nov 12, 2018

Last
Updated

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.

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 8 OptionsWhy?

Best Mac package managers	Price	packages	requires sudo
97 Homebrew	Free	4635	no
88 Homebrew Cask	Free	4051	no
73 Nix package manager	Free	–	–
59 MacPorts	Free	20572	yes
-- pkgsrc	Free	18560	yes

See Full List

7 Other Options Considered

Homebrew Cask

Top Pro

Extends Homebrew

Homebrew Cask adds functionality to Homebrew such as allowing downloads of commercial licensed apps. See More

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. See More

SharpQuiritis's Experience

Love this!! See More

Specs

packages:4051

requires sudo:no

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 See More

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 More

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. See More

See All

Nix package manager

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 everything else is ready, so you'll never end up in a half-finished state of your system. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

There are lots of unfamiliar concepts and jargon (e.g. fixpoint, instantiate, realise). See More

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 once. See More

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 Debian/Ubuntu it can cause severe problems where the upgrade process blocks and the user needs to resolve the 3-way merge. See More

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. See More

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. See More

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). See More

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. See More

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). See More

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. See More

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. See More

See All

MacPorts

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. See More

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 More

MemorableProserpina's Experience

I recommend MacPorts over Homebrew because it has always been reliable and consistent. See More

Specs

packages:20572

requires sudo:yes

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. See More

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. See More

LikableTohil's Experience

Works almost perfectly. See More

Top Pro

Nice variants system

MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options. See More

Top Con

Requires root permissions (sudo) for installation of packages

Top Pro

Fast

Written in Tcl & C, it's generally significantly faster than the competition. Tcl is also quite readable and comparable to Ruby, so it's also friendly to newcomers. See More

Top Pro

Has many more packages than its competitors

As of this writing, 20K packages. 3 to 5x more than other current package managers. See More

Top Pro

MacPorts is a native application: C + TCL

No need to install Ruby, or any other programming language. See More

Top Pro

Requires SUDO to install apps

No need to worry if some rogue app will change your binaries or configuration. See More

Top Pro

Most of the available packages work

For example, trying to install Finch using Pkgsrc doesn't work, while installing it using MacPorts works perfectly. Finch isn't even on Homebrew's radar. See More

See All

pkgsrc

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. See More

Top Con

Not so broadly used on MacOS as compared with MacPorts

You do not hear about Pkgsrc as openly as you hear the words "HomeBrew" or "MacPorts" See More

kaznovac's Experience

very easy to install and usage syntax is familiar to anyone with *nix experience, nice selection of packages (albeit some are not the newest version, but it is easy to contribute updates) See More

Specs

packages:18560

requires sudo:yes

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, etc. that help with developing patches and building binary packages from that. A bit of documentation about that process can be found here. See More

Top Con

Can't install some packages

Even building well known packages (except MacPorts) from source using the ports can fail. See More

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. See More

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 More

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. See More

Top Pro

Does not need Xcode command line tools or Xcode.

This means that you can install it fresh on a new installation of MacOS and have all your favorite apps installed right from the start. See More

Top Pro

Easy installation if you use 3rd party scripts

I used this one and it worked brilliantly. https://github.com/cmacrae/savemacos See More

Top Pro

Works easily with Ansible

Can be used from within Ansible to install packages on macOS. See More

Top Pro

Installs and works in the same way as MacPorts

Installs its own dependencies which means that it is very secure. Cannot install anything unless you use the "sudo" command which is in keeping with the Unix philosophy. See More

See All

Conda

Top Pro

Binary installs

They are fast and reliable as they do not need to compile before installation. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have everything

Conda is relatively new and has a smaller user-base, so the set of packages available is limited. See More

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. See More

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 More

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. See More

See All

Rudix

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 More

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. See More

Top Con

Lacks man files for installed packages

The man files for tools are not installed with the binaries. See More

Top Pro

Very easy and fast

Installing and removing packages is very easy, fast and painless thanks to using binary installs. See More

Top Con

Not sandboxed

Binaries go directly to /usr/bin, so they are not sandboxed. See More

See All

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