Homebrew

Today, I’d like to announce Homebrew 4.2.0. The most significant changes since 4.1.0 are some major performance upgrades (e.g. using Ruby 3.1, upgrading fewer dependencies), .env file configuration and macOS Sonoma support.

Major changes and deprecations since 4.1.0:

• Homebrew now uses and requires Ruby 3.1. If you do not already have a version provided by your system: we provide Portable Ruby 3.1.4 that will be installed whenever needed on Linux x86_64 and macOS Apple Silicon and Intel. This marks the end of Homebrew using the macOS system Ruby. Pour one out for our old friend /usr/bin/ruby on macOS 🍻.
• Formula installation and upgrades are less likely to require dependencies to be upgraded. This should reduce “brew upgrade foo upgraded everything on my system” problems.
• Homebrew/homebrew-core and Homebrew/homebrew-cask now store formulae/casks in “sharded” subdirectories for improved git and GitHub performance.
• Homebrew can be configured with .env files.
• Homebrew supports macOS Sonoma.
• OS::Mac and MacOS usage in formulae on Linux is deprecated. Please guard all uses in formulae with if OS.mac? or if OS.linux? as appropriate.
• brew audit --new-formula and --new-cask options are deprecated. Please use brew audit --new instead.
• brew postgresql-upgrade-database is deprecated. It is not longer needed now that we use versioned postgresql formulae. Please use pg_upgrade directly instead.
• Casks can be, like formulae, deprecated and disabled. Relatedly, the use of discontinued? in casks is deprecated.
• Various other deprecations.

Other changes since 4.1.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• Homebrew detects Apple Silicon M3 processors.
• The macOS .pkg installer is signed (by me!).
• Casks support setting multiple download headers
• brew list --full-names properly output Homebrew organisation names for casks.
• Homebrew uses Sorbet for runtime error checking.
• Homebrew is importing parts of ActiveSupport to speed up command execution time.
• Homebrew supports the rc shell.
• Various sharding fixes
• Downloads from the Homebrew API better support if curl or system certificates are too old.
• brew deps no longer passes options to formulae.
• brew desc has improved handling of--eval-all with formulae.
• brew install will upgrade already installed casks (to be consistent with formulae.)
• brew pin‘d formulae don’t cause as many warnings or errors.
• brew setup-ruby is a new command to just install Homebrew’s Ruby, if needed.
• brew edit will suggest tapping core repositories if untapped.
• The macOS .pkg installer is a documented installation method.
• Formula support ENV.O3 again to allow passing -O3 compiler optimisations.
• brew install sets PIP_CACHE_DIR to cache more Python files when building bottles or from source.
• brew audit checks all relicensed HashiCorp formulae.
• sshpass has (finally?) been removed from the new formula deny list.
• Formula’s service blocks now support multiple sockets.
• bootsnap is used more often, speeding up repeated brew invocations.
• XDG_CACHE_HOME is used correctly again for logs and Homebrew’s cache on Linux.

Finally:

• 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.

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