MacOS – Updating and running Git through Homebrew instead of XCode

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On my new 2014 Mac (OS X 10.9 Mavericks), I have just installed Git using Homebrew. In order to install Homebrew, I had to download and install XCode 5. So now, when I enter the command which git, I can see that Git is running from a different file pathway than the rest of the Homebrew installation. Git's different pathway is /usr/bin/git. I believe it is supposed to be in /usr/local/bin/ instead, with the rest of Homebrew.

I found a solution to getting Git to run from the Homebrew installation (and consequently an updated version of Git). According to another Q&A on this site, the solution is to add export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH" in ~/.bash_profile.

Unfortunately, I don't understand where to enter that information. When I'm in Terminal, I can't change directories to something called "~/.bash_profile." How do I get there to enter the command export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"? I tried entering the command /usr/bin/open ~/.bash_profile, but Terminal tells me: The file /Users/**MYNAME**/.bash_profile does not exist.

Best Answer

This: ~/.bash_profile is a file, not a directory. It's a file that gets executed when you start a bash login shell:

A login shell is a bash shell that is started with - or --login.

When BASH is invoked as a login shell, the following files are executed in the displayed order.

/etc/profile

~/.bash_profile

~/.bash_login

~/.profile

To ensure your Homebrew-installed tools appear before any other tools you can copy and paste the following in to a terminal window to update your ~/.bash_profile file:

cat << 'EOF' >> ~/.bash_profile

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
EOF

This will append (>>) the necessary lines to ~/.bash_profile for you in a safe manner. The append will create the file if it does not exist. The heredoc syntax used above is explained in this nice StackOverflow answer.

After making changes to your .bash_profile file you need to reload it or start a new Terminal session to see the change. To reload it in your existing session type:

source ~/.bash_profile

Related Solutions

How to work around a “Could not resolve host: (nil)…” error when installing/using Homebrew

Seems that you have problems connecting to github via https.

While I'm not sure what could cause it and how to fix it, you still can use git with another protocol.

Here's the commands to install homebrew in /usr/local/ from scratch using git:// instead of https://:

cd /usr/local/
git init -q
git remote add origin git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
git fetch origin master:refs/remotes/origin/master -n
git reset --hard origin/master

That should work. Please notice that if you choose to use another directory for homebrew, you probably will have to append its ./bin directory to your environment PATH variable for comfortable usage.

Terminal commands not found:

If the path includes spaces, you're going to need to quote it.

Your line export PATH=/Users/ps1/Documents/PS 1/whatever-else/:$PATH causes Bash to interpret the PATH=/Users/ps1/Documents/PS part as the full first argument to your PATH—telling export to set the PATH to only the section before the space. If you use export "PATH=/Users/ps1/Documents/PS 1/whatever-else/:$PATH", it will interpret the entire PATH=/Users/ps1/Documents/PS 1/whatever-else/:$PATH as part of the first argument. By convention, most people only quote the right side of the equals sign, because it looks nicer, it's the only thing that needs quoted, and bash automatically concatenates strings with no spaces between them.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to work around a “Could not resolve host: (nil)…” error when installing/using Homebrew

Terminal commands not found:

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