Category Archives: MacPorts

Use Both Homebrew and Macports on Your OS X

Last updated on October 1, 2016

Homebrew and Macports are two excellent package managers on OS X. At most of the time, Homebrew is fair enough: it has a large package collections. But sometimes, there are just some packages not available in Homebrew while they are in Macports. Although having both of them installed is not recommended, I still want to give it a try.

The basic rules here are using Homebrew packages as much as possible. When one package is not available in Homebrew, install it from Macports (you will soon see why). We will wrap the executables installed by Macports with suitable Environmental Variables.

Please note that this post only presents a workaround. It is not garanteed to work, and it is possible that it does not work under some certain circumstances.

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