What It Is
Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. Think of it as an app store that runs in your terminal — you type a command, and it installs software for you. Almost every other tool in our stack is installed through Homebrew.
Install
Open your terminal (press Cmd + Space, type "Terminal", hit Enter) and paste this:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Follow the prompts. It will ask for your Mac password — that's normal.
Important: After installation finishes, Homebrew will print a "Next steps" message with two commands to add Homebrew to your PATH. Run both of them. If you skip this, brew commands won't work.
Verify
Close and reopen your terminal, then run:
brew --version
You should see something like Homebrew 4.x.x. If you get "command not found", you missed the PATH step above — scroll back in your terminal and run those two commands.
Basics
brew install <package> # Install something
brew update # Update Homebrew itself
brew upgrade # Upgrade all installed packages
brew list # See what's installed
You'll use brew install frequently during the rest of this setup.