Package Management

Overview

This lesson will introduce you to using yum, apt-get and brew.

Prerequisite

In order to conduct this lesson you should have knowledge of

Description

If you use Windows of Mac OS X you are already familiar with the installation of programs for those systems. Package management is a slightly different angle to the sample problem: how do you get software, and everything it needs to run, installed on a computer.

All three software packages, yum, apt-get, and brew, are attempts to solve this problem.

If you want to install something on Windows or OS X, you typically go to the producer’s website, find a download link, and run the result.

For example, I want to install Python. How would I accomplish this using brew?

$ brew search python
boost-python    python          python3         wxpython        zpython
...
$ brew install python

Here I did not need to go to the Python webpage. I asked brew to search for python for me. It provided me with a list of options, and I then selected one to install.

A package manager like yum, apt-get, and brew contains a database of software packages and their and their state: installed or not, version installed, version available, name, description. When you want to install a particular package, you need to know the name and then you can issue the appropriate install directive.

Tip

In the case of yum, apt-get, and brew, the install directirve is the same: install.

Important

The key point of using package managers like these is the ability to automate the installation of many packages. If you need to install packages many times, you can save them to a shell script and then run the script on each machine instead of manually installing each by hand.