Homebrew

Today, I’d like to announce Homebrew 4.0.0. The most significant change since 3.6.0 enables significantly faster Homebrew-maintained tap updates by migrating from Git-cloned taps to JSON downloads.

Major changes and deprecations since 3.6.0:

• Using JSON files downloaded from formulae.brew.sh for package installation rather than local homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps.
  • Please note: this is the largest change we have made to our update process since we split Homebrew/brew and Homebrew/homebrew-core repositories. Please bear with us, there may be a few bumps.
  • If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE, HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API or HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS to work around bugs or annoyances: please consider unsetting these and tweaking the values based on the new behaviour.
  • Unless you are developing formulae or casks, you can brew untap homebrew/core and brew untap homebrew/cask to save some space.
  • brew update will now be run automatically less often (every 24 hours rather than every 5 minutes) and these auto-updates will be much faster as they no longer need to perform the slow git fetch of the huge homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps’ Git repositories.
  • This is now the default behaviour so the HOMEBREW_INSTALL_FROM_API variable has been removed and is a no-op.
  • If you wish to opt-out of this behaviour change, you can export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1. Please investigate HOMEBREW_API_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS first.
  • This behaviour is automatically disabled when using certain commands or in configurations that mostly build from source.
  • HOMEBREW_API_DOMAIN can be set to use mirrors for formulae.brew.sh.
• Homebrew’s analytics are now sent both to Google Analytics and our new InfluxDB instance hosted in the EU.
  • Our InfluxDB instance does not store either anonymised IP addresses or an anonymised user token so it has additional privacy benefits over Google Analytics.
  • If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS because you didn’t like Google Analytics and/or data being sent to the USA: please consider unsetting this and setting HOMEBREW_NO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS instead, allowing analytics data to be sent to our new InfluxDB host.
  • We expect to migrate entirely from Google Analytics to our InfluxDB instance in ~100 days at which point we will remove all Google Analytics and destroy all existing data. Note: this occurred on 2023-06-16!
• macOS .pkg files are generated for each Homebrew release. You can help us test this beta feature by downloading the generated package artifact from the relevant GitHub Actions release events.
• The homebrew/ubuntu16.04:master image has been deprecated.
• Various major release deprecations and disables.

Other changes since 3.6.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• brew test sets PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE to improve performance.
• VSCode devcontainers are available in the Homebrew/brew repository for use with e.g. GitHub Codespaces.
• brew install --adopt allows taking ownership of existing installed cask artifacts.
• brew install --dry-run allows viewing what brew install will do before it is run.
• brew docs opens docs.brew.sh.
• --cask is never required on Linux.
• service do blocks allow defining a run command per platform.
• brew install uses the local cache while installing dependencies from pip.
• brew doctor no longer complains about BitDefender.
• brew install will also suggest casks rather than just formulae when it fails to find the requested package.
• brew readall simulates all architecture and OS configurations for better reliability.
• git partial clones with sparse checkouts are supported when downloading using git.
• GCC 12 is used for runtime libraries to match Ubuntu 22.04, where we build our bottles.
• brew doctor --quiet prints no output on success.
• brew gist-logs better detects missing permissions.
• brew update uses the GitHub API token if available to avoid hitting rate limits.
• We have discontinued WSL 1 support and recommend WSL 2 instead.
• brew fetch and brew install can automatically determine mirrors for glibc-bootstrap and PyPI resources.

Finally:

• Homebrew is now on Mastodon: @homebrew@fosstodon.org.
• Our governance documents have been updated as part of our AGM.
• We have switched from HackerOne to GitHub for vulnerability reporting.
• Homebrew accepts donations through GitHub Sponsors and still accepts donations through Patreon. If you can afford it, please consider donating. If you’d rather not use GitHub Sponsors or Patreon (our preferred donation methods), check out the other ways to donate in our README.
• Homebrew had our first stand at FOSDEM 2023 in which the Project Leader was forced to wear a stupid beer suit.

Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far.