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I applaud this, for people who prefer a GUI interface.

I started to write something to better organize synchronizing my Homebrew installation across multiple machines, then thought someone must have done this well already. Sure enough,

https://pumpingco.de/blog/brewfile/

A fantastic, clean way to reinstall or synchronize Homebrew setups, using the command line. I'm surprised that Applite doesn't accept a brewfile to ease migration.

In my case I depend on Bash, Tailscale, and Ruby as installed by Homebrew, so a clean reinstallation is delicate. I have scripts to make sure I don't screw this up:

1 brew bundle dump.sh 2 uninstall homebrew.sh 3 install homebrew.sh 4 renew bash.sh 5 renew tailscale.sh 6 renew ruby.sh 7 renew brew bundle.sh choose-shell.sh



One more neat trick for Brewfiles: They're evaluated as Ruby code, so you can use if-else etc. to conditionally install things on different machines with a single Brewfile. I use that together with yadm to manage both work and private laptops with minimum duplication.


I have an idempotent provision script I use to install/update apps. The homebrew portion is basically

  brew upgrade
  HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew bundle --file=Brewfile --cleanup --no-upgrade
Works really nicely to keep everything tidy, up-to-date, and transferable.


Agree, it's good for those that prefer a GUI. I'm not sure the intended audience since if you are using Brew, you are generally doing a lot of commandline stuff.

Your mention of the cross multiple machine synchronizing, however, is interesting! Good to find.


how to you update you config with new/deleted apps if you've manually added categories and comments like the blog's author shows on his site?




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