Installing Drush on Mac using Homebrew

Last updated May 2, 2011. Created by Davy Van Den Bremt on October 27, 2010.
Edited by clemens.tolboom, gagarine. Log in to edit this page.

Homebrew is a package manager. It's a easy and flexible way to install UNIX tools Apple didn't include with OS X.

Installing Homebrew

If you haven't installed homebrew yet follow the installation instruction for homebrew.

Preparing for drush

After successful installation of homebrew we need to be capable to grab drush from git.

brew install git
brew update

This will install homebrew in your /usr/local folder, install git and link homebrew to its git repository.

Installing Drush

Using Homebrew you can install Drush install in one command

brew install drush

This will also install Drush Make.

After that you can start running drush on your installation.

drush help

Comments

link to install homebrew

Posted by aquariumtap on December 25, 2010 at 7:56pm

The curl link for installing homebrew seems to have changed. It is now:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSLk https://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"

reference (likely to be more up-to-date): https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation

On Mac PowerPC using MAMP Pro

Posted by bcobin on January 4, 2011 at 11:10pm

Homebrew looks like it's Intel only, but if you're using MAMP Pro on a PowerPC Mac, I found that all I needed to do was extract Drush into my main sandbox folder and then copy and rename the example.drushrc.php (to drushrc.php) file into the same folder. It works on all my sandbox sites like a charm.

Drush without sudo?

Posted by kostajh on March 5, 2011 at 4:15pm

trying to run drush gives me this error:

Could not open input file: /usr/local/lib/drush/drush.php

I have to run sudo drush to get it to work. How can I use drush without sudo when using Homebrew to install? I've only encountered this problem when using Homebrew to install drush.

chown username /usr/local

Posted by zorp on June 24, 2011 at 6:34am

For homwbrew to work correctly the folder /usr/local must be owned by your user accoount... sometime it change into being owned by root.

try running $ brew doctor
and it will probaly tell you that it can't write to /usr/local folder

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