Include Homebrew in universal image

[texastoland]

I imagine there's a reason this wasn't done already. I thought it's worth opening an issue for others searching too. My use case is replicating my Mac config in Codespaces. I want a few CLIs available everywhere like lazygit. It can be installed with conda-forge but that isn't true for everything. Default Apt sources simply don't include many modern utilities.

Related: microsoft/vscode-dev-containers#357

[eljog]

As discussed on the issue you linked here microsoft/vscode-dev-containers#357 (comment) the growing size of the universal image is one thing that holds us conservative when adding new packages.

Have you considered installing Homebrew as a feature inside your devcontainers json. Looks like there are community provided devcontainer-features available for Homebrew. See https://containers.dev/features

[texastoland]

My use case (and the general use case for Codespaces) is reproducing my dev environment from dotfiles in every image (using brew bundle).

Considerations

1. No other package manager on the image hosts popular modern utilities (Nushell for example) nor (especially) cross-platform
2. Add Homebrew to the default Codespaces image microsoft/vscode-dev-containers#357 (comment) mentions a "lite" installation which has since become the default by replacing shallow cloning with GitHub API calls (even less disk space)
3. brew could be a shell function that installs on first use (exactly how Homebrew subcommands work)