brew help service - Shell-Bash

Introduction

As a programmer, you might be familiar with running services to deploy your applications. In Unix-based systems, you can use the service command to start, stop, restart, or reload a system service. However, macOS doesn't come with this command by default. Thankfully, brew provides a service command that can fill this gap.

Prerequisites

Before using the brew service command, you need to make sure you have Homebrew installed on your macOS machine. You can install Homebrew by running the following command in your Terminal:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Usage

Once you have Homebrew installed, you can use the brew service command to manage your macOS services. Here are some useful commands and options:

• brew services - List all available services and their status.
• brew services list - Same as brew services.
• brew services start <service> - Start a service.
• brew services stop <service> - Stop a service.
• brew services restart <service> - Restart a service.
• brew services reload <service> - Reload a service without stopping it.
• brew services cleanup - Remove unused services from Homebrew's services directory.

Examples

Here are some examples of how to use the brew service command:

# List all available services
$ brew services
Name       Status  User Plist
dnsmasq    stopped      
mysql      stopped      
nginx      stopped      
php        stopped      
postgresql stopped      
redis      stopped      

# Start a service
$ brew services start nginx
==> Successfully started `nginx` (label: homebrew.mxcl.nginx)

# Stop a service
$ brew services stop nginx
==> Successfully stopped `nginx` (label: homebrew.mxcl.nginx)

# Restart a service
$ brew services restart nginx
Stopping `nginx`... (might take a while)
==> Successfully stopped `nginx` (label: homebrew.mxcl.nginx)
==> Successfully started `nginx` (label: homebrew.mxcl.nginx)

# Reload a service
$ brew services reload nginx
==> Successfully reloaded `nginx` (label: homebrew.mxcl.nginx)

# Cleanup unused services
$ brew services cleanup
Deleting unused services...
This operation has freed approximately 0B of disk space.

Conclusion

The brew service command is a useful tool for managing your macOS services. With its simple syntax, you can start, stop, restart, or reload your services and keep your applications up and running. If you're a Homebrew user, it's definitely worth checking out.