Brew installation

On a fresh Mac out of the box, git is apparently available:

> which git
/usr/bin/git

but not actually:

> git --version
xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at
'/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the
dialog to download the command line developer tools.

I would prefer to have as much as possible managed by brew, so a prerequisite task is to installing anything is to install brew. This is done by:

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

which installs a bunch of stuff in /usr/local/. (NB /usr/local/ was previously empty.)

In the process of installing brew, the very same Command Line Tools as were required above for Git to start working were downloaded anyway. Homebrew itself requires either the Command Line Tools for Xcode, or the full Xcode application (or both), for some formulae (because these give access to a compiler, Make, etc.). So, if not already available, the Command Line Tools for Xcode are automatically downloaded and installed by the Homebrew installer.

These are located in /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools.

After this process, /usr/local/ is populated with a bunch of Homebrew-specific folders:

/usr/local/Caskroom
/usr/local/Cellar
/usr/local/Frameworks
/usr/local/Homebrew

as well as various general standard Unix names (that were created by Homebrew):

/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/etc
/usr/local/include
/usr/local/lib
/usr/local/opt
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/share
/usr/local/var

Most are empty to start with and will be popoulated by Homebrew when packages are installed.

The exceptions are:

• /usr/local/Homebrew - this contains the cloned Git repository of Homebrew itself, cloned from https://github.com/Homebrew/brew.
• /usr/local/bin - contains a symlink brew linking back to /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew. rhis is the primary executable run when you type brew (because as standard /usr/local/bin is on the $PATH.

Inside usr/local/Homebrew is also Library, which (according to its README):

contains all the code run by the official brew and brew cask commands in Homebrew and all formulae (package descriptions) in taps (repositories containing formulae) in Taps subdirectories.

and within this are folders Homebrew, which contains what is presumably the main source code of Homebrew, and Taps, which will contain repositories of formulae.

Under this Taps folder, we initially have only a homebrew/homebrew-core repository of formulae. This is a separate Git repo cloned from https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core, which contans inside its Formula directory many Ruby scripts - these are the formulae that describe how a package should be installed. For example, in here is git.rb, which begins:

class Git < Formula
  desc "Distributed revision control system"
  homepage "https://git-scm.com"
  url ...
  sha256 ...
  license ...
  head ...

  ...

  depends_on "gettext"
  depends_on "pcre2"

  ...

After the Homebrew installation has completed, we can verify that the Xcode Command Line Tools have been installed with:

> xcode-select -p
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

and that Homebrew recognises them:

> brew config
...
CLT: 12.0.0.0.1.1599194153
Xcode: N/A

Now, as a side-effect of this, Git works:

> git --version
git version 2.24.3 (Apple Git-128)

Note however, that it's the Apple version of Git that has come with the Xcode CLT, not Homebrew's version.

Now, when I do:

brew install git

Homebrew reports an updated tap (homebrew/core), indicating that the Git repository at /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core has been updated; and one Formula having been updated; then, the two dependencies we saw above (gettext and pcre2) are installed, before git itself is installed. As a result, there are new folders for each of these dependencies in /usr/local/Cellar, and a number of symlinks in /usr/local/bin pointing back to them.

Now - after opening a new terminal at least - I get the following:

> which git
/usr/local/bin/git

and:

> git --version
git version 2.28.0

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