Installation

Instructions for a supported install of Homebrew are on the homepage.

This script installs Homebrew to its default, supported, best prefix (/usr/local for macOS Intel, /opt/homebrew for Apple Silicon and /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew for Linux) so that you don’t need sudo after Homebrew’s initial installation when you brew install. This prefix is required for most bottles (binary packages) to be used. It is a careful script; it can be run even if you have stuff installed in the preferred prefix already. It tells you exactly what it will do before it does it too. You have to confirm everything it will do before it starts.

macOS Requirements

A 64-bit Intel CPU or Apple Silicon CPU ¹
macOS Big Sur (11) (or higher) ²
Command Line Tools (CLT) for Xcode (from xcode-select --install or https://developer.apple.com/download/all/) or Xcode ³
The Bourne-again shell for installation (i.e. bash) ⁴

Git Remote Mirroring

You can use geolocalized Git mirrors to speed up Homebrew’s installation and brew update by setting HOMEBREW_BREW_GIT_REMOTE and/or HOMEBREW_CORE_GIT_REMOTE in your shell environment with this script:

export HOMEBREW_BREW_GIT_REMOTE="..."  # put your Git mirror of Homebrew/brew here
export HOMEBREW_CORE_GIT_REMOTE="..."  # put your Git mirror of Homebrew/homebrew-core here
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

The default Git remote will be used if the corresponding environment variable is unset.

Default Tap Cloning

You can instruct Homebrew to return to pre-4.0.0 behaviour by cloning the Homebrew/homebrew-core tap during installation by setting the HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API environment variable with the following:

export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

This will make Homebrew install formulae and casks from the homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps using local checkouts of these repositories instead of Homebrew’s API.

Note, this will take effect in supported configurations (i.e. using the default Homebrew prefix and, if on macOS, on a supported version).

Unattended installation

If you want a non-interactive run of the Homebrew installer that doesn’t prompt for passwords (e.g. in automation scripts), prepend NONINTERACTIVE=1 to the installation command.

Alternative Installs

Linux or Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux

Check out the Homebrew on Linux installation documentation.

Untar anywhere (unsupported)

Technically, you can just extract (or git clone) Homebrew wherever you want. However, you shouldn’t install outside the default, supported, best prefix. Many things will need to be built from source outside the default prefix. Building from source is slow, energy-inefficient, buggy and unsupported. The main reason Homebrew just works is because we use bottles (binary packages) and most of these require using the default prefix. If you decide to use another prefix: don’t open any issues, even if you think they are unrelated to your prefix choice. They will be closed without response.

TL;DR: pick another prefix at your peril!

mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew

or:

git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/brew homebrew

then:

eval "$(homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"
brew update --force --quiet
chmod -R go-w "$(brew --prefix)/share/zsh"

Make sure you avoid installing into:

Directories with names that contain spaces. Homebrew itself can handle spaces, but many build scripts cannot.
/tmp subdirectories because Homebrew gets upset.
/sw and /opt/local because build scripts get confused when Homebrew is there instead of Fink or MacPorts, respectively.

Multiple installations (unsupported)

Create a Homebrew installation wherever you extract the tarball. Whichever brew command is called is where the packages will be installed. You can use this as you see fit, e.g. to have a system set of libs in the default prefix and tweaked formulae for development in ~/homebrew.

Uninstallation

Uninstallation is documented in the FAQ.

¹ For 32-bit or PPC support see Tigerbrew.

² macOS 11 (Big Sur) or higher is best and supported, 10.11 (El Capitan) – 10.15 (Catalina) are unsupported but may work and 10.10 (Yosemite) and older will not run Homebrew at all. For 10.4 (Tiger) – 10.6 (Snow Leopard) see Tigerbrew.

³ You may need to install Xcode, the CLT, or both depending on the formula, to install a bottle (binary package) which is the only supported configuration. Downloading Xcode may require an Apple Developer account on older versions of Mac OS X. Sign up for free at Apple’s website.

⁴ The one-liner installation method found on brew.sh uses the Bourne-again shell at /bin/bash. Notably, zsh, fish, tcsh and csh will not work.

Homebrew Documentation