Installing Homebrew w/o Xcode CLI

[dmarcnw]

Is there a way to deploy Homebrew without having to install Apple's CLI tools? I'd like to keep Apple's tools off of our machines to just force our dev's to use Homebrew for all of there tools. I'm sure someone here has come across this need before.

[AVmcclint]

The solutions may depend on if you are giving the devs admin rights or not on their computers.

[dmarcnw]

I am giving them their rights. It comes down to a bigger issue about different teams within our environment that silo themselves with their tools. Some use Apple's CLI for development, some use Homebrew. We'd like to bring them all under the same umbrella of support.

It's not that we're trying to take away some of the teams workflow, we just want to make overall team collaborations the same with their tools. It also will make supporting them down the road easier for us.

[AVmcclint]

According to the Homebrew site, it requires the Xcode commandline tools. Have you poked around on the Homebrew site to see if there's a way to do what you're looking for? My guess is that the homebrew installation requires some component to download and compile. I've never seen anything mentioned for what specifically it needs, so I couldn't go out and manually obtain those components individually myself. Installing the commandline tools has no downside for us so I just stick with that.

[sdagley]

Homebrew is designed to download source and compile the tools on a user's Mac via the CLI tools rather than distributing binaries. Unless you were planning on having a master machine download and compile all of the desired Homebrew packages, then copied the compiled binaries to your user's machines I don't see how you'd be able to avoid having Apple's CLI tools installed for everybody.