Installing Homebrew & Core Tools

First: open your terminal

Press ⌘ + Space, type Terminal, and press Enter. This opens the built-in macOS terminal. We'll upgrade to Ghostty later — for now the default is fine.

Step 1: Install Xcode Command Line Tools

Before anything else, your Mac needs the basic developer toolchain. Run:

xcode-select --install

A pop-up will appear. Click Install and wait for it to finish (a few minutes). This gives your Mac the compilers and system libraries many other tools depend on.

Step 2: Install Homebrew

Homebrew describes itself as "the missing package manager for macOS." Paste this into your terminal and press Enter:

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

It will ask for your Mac password (you won't see the characters as you type — that's normal). The install takes 2–5 minutes.

echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> ~/.zprofile && eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

Verify it worked:

brew --version

Step 3: Install core developer tools

Now use Homebrew to install everything you need in one command:

brew update
brew install git gh jq ripgrep

What each one does:

• git — version control (tracks changes to your code)
• gh — the official GitHub CLI (create repos, manage PRs from the terminal)
• jq — processes JSON data (used by Claude Code's statusline and scripts)
• ripgrep (rg) — a super-fast code search tool

Step 4: Install Bun

Bun is a fast JavaScript runtime and package manager. It replaces npm/yarn for this setup:

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

After it installs, close and reopen your terminal window, then verify:

bun --version

Step 5: Verify everything

Run each of these and confirm you get a version number back:

git --version
gh --version
jq --version
bun --version

If any of them fail, re-run the install step for that tool.

In the next lesson we'll install Ghostty — a much better terminal than the default Mac one.