Homebrew has this. Check out Brewfiles and homebrew-bundle. If you want a (excuse self-promotion) dedicated but simple tool to bootstrap new systems: check out https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap
I use Strap (https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap) to manage everything and it works pretty dang well for me on macOS. Homebrew brewfiles were a game-changer.
Apologies for the self-plug but this is what I built for GitHub to do exactly this: https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap. Add Homebrew Bundle and a Dotfiles repo into the mix and you get what was described. This is obviously pretty Homebrew and GitHub centric because I work on both.
Homebrew + Strap is a winning combination. (https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap)
But I do think that the various taps and casks and sprockets and bits are potentially getting out of hand. Homebrew 2.0 - New API and usage pattern?
However:
cask outdated: Finally! Thank you! search: Updates most welcome.
And plenty of others. Thanks for all. And one tip:
export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1
That saves me no end of time and irritation on slower networks. And on faster networks, too. I don't want auto-update on by default, but if it has to be, so be it. There's the fix.
Have you seen Strap?
Strap is a script to bootstrap a minimal OS X development system. This does not assume you're doing Ruby/Rails/web development but installs the minimal set of software every OS X developer will want.