3  macOS

3.1 Xcode Command Line Tools

We recommend installing the Xcode Command Line Tools, which makes several useful software utilities available.

Open a terminal and run:

xcode-select --install

3.2 Homebrew

On macOS the brew package manager is a popular choice for installing packages as a user. Note that for research work we recommend using Mamba for managing software environments, but for general utilities brew is a good solution.

First, make sure to install Xcode as instructed in the previous section. Then, open a terminal and run:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Test your brew installation by installing the wget utility, which is used to download files from the web:

brew install wget