Forcing Homebrew and Macports to coexist?

Question

I have a MacOSX system that I've been using for a number of years, and during this time, I have installed quite a few packages via Macports.

I now want to try Homebrew, but it's clear from what I've read here and elsewhere that the default installations of Homebrew and Macports cannot easily coexist.

It is not a viable option for me to uninstall Macports, since so much of my daily MacOSX work involves using various Macports-installed utilities. Furthermore, many of my own, homegrown utilities are now interdependent with Macports. And finally, a lot of executables and shared libraries that I routinely use are now installed under /usr/local, and my system would quickly become unusable if I cleared out that directory tree.

So my question is this: has anyone come up with an alternate way to install Homebrew which can coexist with Macports? Specifically, has anyone figured out how to make Homebrew utilize a directory tree such as /usr/local/homebrew instead of /usr/local?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or pointers to docs.

Answer 1

You can tell Homebrew to use its own directory, and then add that to the path. Although not for the same purpose, this excerpt from the installation guide tells it:

Multiple installations

Create a Homebrew installation wherever you extract the tarball. Whichever brew command is called is where the packages will be installed. You can use this as you see fit, e.g. a system set of libs in /usr/local and tweaked formulae for development in ~/homebrew

Source: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation

Answer 2

My way to force them coexist is to make MacPorts not visible by default, but visible when invoking any MacPorts programs. That is, wrap MacPorts programs with some script like:

if [ "$#" -le 0 ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 command [arg1, arg2, ...]" >&2
  exit 1
fi
if [[ -z $MACPORTS_PREFIX ]]; then
  MACPORTS_PREFIX='/opt/local'
fi
export PATH="$MACPORTS_PREFIX/bin:$MACPORTS_PREFIX/sbin:$PATH"
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MACPORTS_PREFIX/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export CPATH="$MACPORTS_PREFIX/include:$CPATH"
command=$1
shift
exec $command $* 

If you name this script as macports.sh, you can do the wrapping by macports.sh macports_bin, such as macports.sh port will run port wrapped.

For convenience, you can put macports.sh something into some scripts with the same name as the commands themselves and put them in your HOME directory, such as ~/bin, ~/.local/bin, etc.

I've written a blog post about this one month ago. You can read it if you need a look into the details.