Show HN: Cider — Hassle-free bootstrapping using Homebrew

It's also the name of a Wine dervative used for many Mac ports of Windows games. https://www.transgaming.com/cider

It will install cask for you, but homebrew needs to be installed via the script on http://brew.sh/#install (you also need to have Xcode or Apple's cli tools installed).

This is good to know. Any suggestions for a better name?

I contemplated doing that (something like the brew-cask syntax), but it ended up not really being worth the complexity, especially when you consider that not all of the commands necessarily correlate to those in Homebrew (e.g. setting defaults). Might consider doing something like that in the future though, if it ends up that people aside from me want this.

It's also worth noting that even projects such as Homebrew Cask are also merely extensions to Homebrew (AFAIK, there aren't any plans of it getting merged in anytime soon).

I actually tried mackup a few weeks ago and had to wipe my machine because it messed up my settings so much (who would've thought backup could be such a dangerous command?)

Cider's approach is much safer since all it does is reinstall the components & settings you've specifically allotted it to. Rather than move all your various configs and caches around in an attempt to keep them in sync (which is, IMO, subject to headaches and not worth the hassle), the whole point of Cider is to keep as little state on your machine as possible so you can stop thinking about this stuff.

Right now it's updated whenever you install something with cider. You can update it with whatever you currently have installed using `cider [cask] missing`. Defaults are the same way - cider supports the same syntax as the `defaults` command, so you should be able to use it as a drop-in replacement in most cases.

Symlinks and scripts are manual, but I plan on changing that: https://github.com/msanders/cider/issues/3