In the good old days, you used to install tools and application by either downloading packaged installers or zip/tar files that you either ran or uncompressed in a desired location.
These days, a developer has to be comfortable with command line tool installation. In fact, simple file based technologies like CSS and JS are installed over command line like there are some utility to be run from the terminal. So in my own, left-handed, change-defying way, I preferred the direct download option, I get to ‘touch’ and ‘tinker’ the files I received, modifying them as I see fit.
However, I can understand and got to accept the advantages of the command line install. The major one, being that installation of tools and applications can now be automated using bash scripts: a collection of command line instructions to batch process the installation of needed tools and utilities at a go.
The downside however is that the installation command lines change from time to time, utility to utility, OS to OS and finally, vendor to vendor. It will be quite a task to keep track of the correct installation command lines for each tool. Therefore I will be documenting the installation of some important utilities on one of my development machines (a Mac OSX Yosemite). I will also update these articles as I make installations to other operating systems.
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