I just got a Macbook Pro at work. So far I like it a lot but I ran into the problem that I’m not an admin (and the permissions on /usr/local/ were completely locked down) on it and I wanted to be able to install Homebrew tools whenever I felt like it.

First, clone Homebrew into your home directory:

    cd $HOME
    git clone https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git

Next, add Homebrew to your path (your syntax might be different if you’re not using bash):

    export $PATH=${HOME}/homebrew/bin:${PATH}

Now test, I installed tmux, MacVim and tree (shows a nice hierarchical view of a database structure):

    brew install tree
    tree