Homebrew

Today, I’d like to announce Homebrew 4.4.0. The most significant changes since 4.3.0 are official macOS Sequoia (15) support, INSTALL_RECEIPT.json files for casks, macOS Monterey (12) deprecation and various other deprecations.

Major changes and deprecations since 4.3.0:

• macOS Sequoia (15) is officially supported by Homebrew.
• Newly installed casks have install receipts (INSTALL_RECEIPT.json files).
• macOS Monterey (12) is no longer supported by Homebrew and no longer a CI target for Homebrew.
• External commands in the old, non-AbstractCommand style are deprecated and should be migrated to AbstractCommand.
• Disabled packages output the date when they will be disabled.
• url do blocks are deprecated for casks.
• An Ubuntu 24.04 Docker image was added.
• The Ubuntu 18.04 Homebrew Docker image is deprecated.
• brew tab is a new command for editing tab information.
• Setting Homebrew’s boolean environment variables to falsey values is deprecated.
• Homebrew no longer supports building with GCC 4.9, 5 and 6.
• The usual cycle of deprecations, disables and code removals.

Other changes since 4.3.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• Homebrew uses Ruby 3.3.5.
• brew upgrade --cask --quiet is quieter.
• brew outdated assumes the --greedy flag was passed when HOMEBREW_UPGRADE_GREEDY is set.
• brew install --cask --adopt only cares if the cask doesn’t auto-update.
• brew search --desc and brew desc --search use the JSON API’s data for description searches.
• brew autoremove does not remove formulae that were built from source.
• Homebrew will rewrite node shebangs on installation (mirroring python and perl).
• brew install will prioritise homebrew-cask casks over non-Homebrew organisation formulae.
• brew info will show size information for bottles.
• brew list has new --poured-from-bottle and --built-from-source flags.
• brew shellenv will set XDG_DATA_DIRS on Linux.
• brew typecheck supports using Sorbet for typechecking in taps.
• HOMEBREW_NO_BUILD_ERROR_ISSUES is a new environment variable that prevents Homebrew from searching for relevant GitHub issues on a build error.
• brew search allows searching with @ and + characters.
• A homebrew/brew:master Docker image was added.

Finally:

• Homebrew’s 501c3 OpenCollective is empty. We are only using our 501c6 OpenCollective.
• In case you missed it, Homebrew had a 2023 security audit that was released in July.
• Homebrew had a Summer 2024 Hackathon in July which focused on implementing the results of the security audit and improving performance of many parts of Homebrew.
• 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.