GitHub - chirsz-ever/install-homebrew-on-alpine-linux: Instructions to install Homebrew on Alpine Linux

Install Homebrew on Alpine Linux

There is a wiki page with the same title as this article in the original Linuxbrew repository (now merged into Homebrew)¹, but the information there is slightly out of date. So here is a more up-to-date version.

You can start Alpine Linux with the alpine Docker image:

docker run -it --rm alpine:latest sh

Prepare dependencies

apk add bash curl git libc6-compat sudo
sed -i -- '1a\
case $1 in --version)\
    echo "ldd 2.16"\
    exit\
esac' /usr/bin/ldd
ln -s /bin/stat /usr/bin/stat

Homebrew now can automatically download and install Potable Ruby, so we don't need to install Ruby from the package manager.

Potable Ruby depends on glibc, and Alpine Linux uses musl libc, so we need to install the libc6-compat package. On newer versions of Alpine Linux, libc6-compat is an alias for gcompat.

The installation script would use ldd to check the glibc version, so we use sed to patch the ldd script.

The installation script uses /usr/bin/stat, but Alpine Linux only has /bin/stat, so we create a symlink.

Add a normal user

Add a normal user, add it to the wheel group, and allow it to use sudo. Homebrew do not allow running as root, so we need a normal user.

adduser tom
adduser tom wheel
echo '%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL' > /etc/sudoers.d/99-custom
su -l tom

Dwonload the installation script and run it

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh
bash install.sh

Post-installation

Try running some commands and install some packages.

eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv sh)"
brew doctor
brew install hello
hello

NOTE:

• brew shellenv without arguments will failed, because it needs ps to support -p option, which is not supported by busybox. You can use like brew shellenv sh to declare the shell type explicitly, or install procps-ng package.
• brew list will fail, because it needs ls to support -q option, which is not supported by busybox². You can install coreutils package, or use the patched ls script to replace /bin/ls.
• the uninstallation script will fail, because it needs find to support -lname filter, which is not supported by busybox. You can install findutils package to fix this.