Install homebrew if not installed

[chbrown]

Obviously, this is already on the Cakebrew To-do list, but it'd be a killer feature to have.

"Afraid to use the terminal but need that small program or tool?" describes my clientele and use-case perfectly, for whom even ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" might be a bit much to ask.

Maybe a separate window on the Cakebrew app for basic homebrew installation, filled with disclaimers, that can shell out to that ruby command? I'm pretty sure all post-Lion OS X's will come with ruby and curl.

[xhruso00]

If it is a click of a button that would install Homebrew I would be more than happy.

Homebrew requirements: 1) Xcode or command line tools for xcode 2) User input in certain cases during homebrew installation

Only solution I see is single button that can open terminal and a single button to download command line tools for xcode. What do you think?

[brunophilipe]

Command line tools installation prompt is displayed whenever the user tries to use a developer tool such as git or gcc, but it requires the admin password. Also, the Homebrew installation can have some hiccups, as I have already seen happening with some friends' machines. What would be done about them?

[brunophilipe]

I am going to start working on this. I'll try setting up a VM in a way that I can revert the Homebrew installation so this can be tested thoroughly.

[brunophilipe]

Ok, I've experimented with this, and so far it can't be done just by running the brew install script like we do with the brew tasks. The installer requires a TTY-enabled interface to use sudo, which can't be simulated using NSTask at all.

Enabling it via ask-pass sounds very complicated as well.

My latest tests are on the install-homebrew branch.

[chriskilding]

Here's an alternative approach (very much WIP) as food for thought...

It seems comparatively simple to ship a single fat binary with a Mac application (well, compared to shipping code + an interpreter + trying to keep that lot updated). Thus far, it seems that people have only considered shipping the Homebrew utility as is, in its interpreted form.

However, I was playing with RubyMotion recently and thought there could be another way. If it were possible to compile Homebrew with RubyMotion into a single fat binary - which is what I have been looking at - I guess the Cakebrew crew could just stick it in the Cakebrew Application Support directory, and boom, it's done.

For bonus points - assuming the above worked - I guess someone could write a little script to add the Cakebrew Application Support dir to the user's PATH so that brew can be invoked in the terminal.

Work in progress can be seen at https://github.com/themasterchef/homebrew - it doesn't yet compile because Homebrew uses a few Ruby features which RubyMotion doesn't support, sometimes on principle (like runtime requires scattered throughout method bodies to load more code - yuck!). But it seems somewhat viable that those features could be replaced in the Homebrew app code, without having to touch the Formulae. I have listed some of the things we might need to replace in the 'Rubymotion learnings' section of the README.

[danielbair]

If you would like to try another way, I have two bash scripts. The first one 'homebrew_install.sh' uses AppleScript to open the Terminal and execute the second script 'install_homebrew.sh', which does the homebrew install and also updates the environment variables.

So, you could check if homebrew is not installed and call 'homebrew_install.sh' to initiate the installation via Terminal.

HomeBrewInstaller.zip

[twardoch]

If you name a shell script install_homebrew.command instead of install_homebrew.sh and make it executable (chmod gou+x install_homebrew.command) then it will launched when double-clicked.