How to Install All Google Fonts on macOS

A simple guide to install the entire Google Fonts library on macOS

Google Fonts is a collection of free licensed font families. It has hundred of fonts freely use for personal and commercial purposes. It is popular mostly among web developers and designers.

One time I want to use the same font from my web to my vector design. I can just install the desired fonts and use it on macOS. But what if I want to experiment with other fonts?

Installing the fonts one by one is not really a good idea. Google doesn’t provide an easy to use installer either. So, in this tutorial, I’ll show you how easy it is to install all Google Fonts on your macOS. Not just that, I’ll also show you how to update the library to you’ll have up to date collection.

Installing Google Fonts

In this section, I’ll show you how to fresh install all Google Fonts on macOS. After you finished this, you’ll be able to use the Fonts in any applications.

First, open Terminal app. It’s located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. After a Terminal window appeared, copy and paste following snippet, then press enter.

cd ~/Library/Fonts/

This will change your working directory to ~/Library/Fonts. This is the default installation path for user fonts on macOS.

The next step is to download all Google Fonts git repository. Copy and paste following snippet to your terminal window, then press enter.

git clone https://github.com/google/fonts.git google-fonts

This will create a new directory named google-fonts. This is where all Google Fonts will be stored.

The process may take a while, by the time this article is written, the total file size is around 1.6 GB. So be patient waiting.

After the git clone process finished, open Font Book app. Open the User section and you’ll see all Google Fonts are indexed there. That means the installation is finished successfully, now you can use the fonts in any macOS apps.

Updating Google Fonts

In case in the future Google add new fonts, you can just update the git repository. Open Terminal app again. Copy and paste following snippet, then press enter.

cd ~/Library/Fonts/google-fonts/

This will change your working directory to the installed Google Fonts path from previous section. To update the font collection, simply pull the git repository from the server. To do that, just type following snippet.

git pull

The process won’t take long, because it’ll only download the new fonts, not re-download entire packages. After the process finished, you can see the updated fonts from Font Book app.

Removing All Google Fonts

In case for some reason, you want to remove all installed Google Fonts, simply open the Terminal app, copy and paste the following snippet, then press enter.

rm -rf ~/Library/Fonts/google-fonts/

This command will remove all installed Google Fonts from your macOS. The Font Book should be returned to the state like before you install Google Fonts.

Conclusion

That’s all I can write for today. Hope this simple tutorial is helpful. Thank you for reading!

References

Cover Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash