Homebrew

Today, I’d like to announce Homebrew 4.5.0. The most significant changes since 4.4.0 are major improvements to brew bundle/services, preliminary Linux support for casks, official Support Tiers, Tier 2 ARM64 Linux support, Ruby 3.4 and several deprecations.

Major changes and deprecations since 4.4.0:

brew bundle and brew services

• The documentation for Homebrew Bundle, brew bundle and Brewfile has been hugely improved. It also documents the many new brew bundle features and changes in this release.
• brew bundle and brew services are built-in commands instead of being provided by an external tap.
• brew bundle (exec|env|sh) no longer filter the user’s environment (like other brew commands do)
• brew services supports passing multiple formulae
• Brewfiles have a version_file: DSL that allows brew bundle to write to e.g. a .ruby-version file based on the installed version
• brew bundle no longer includes ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/bin in the $PATH by default. You can do this in your Brewfile with ENV["PATH"] = "#{HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/bin:#{ENV["PATH"]}".

Linux casks

• Some Homebrew casks are supported on Linux. Right now these are mostly fonts and those with Linux binaries. Some casks will never be available on Linux, such as those for macOS-specific software. The Homebrew Linux fonts cask tap has been deprecated as a result.
• brew bump-cask-pr allows bumping multi-platform casks on Linux

Support Tiers

• Homebrew has three documented Support Tiers plus Unsupported. Tier 1, previously called “supported”, is where you’ll get bottles/binary packages and we have CI coverage.
• brew doctor links to Support Tiers
• brew doctor checks for OpenCore Legacy Patcher
• Clarify that the OpenCore Legacy Patcher is Tier 2 or 3

ARM64 Linux

• Homebrew provides a Portable Ruby for ARM64 Linux. This is the first step towards hopefully being able to provide Tier 1 support for ARM64 Linux in the future.
• Homebrew refers to ARM64 Linux, not AArch64 Linux (for consistency with macOS)
• Homebrew publishes some ARM64 Docker images

Ruby

• Homebrew provides Portable Ruby 3.4.3. It also requires Ruby >=3.4 to run.
• Homebrew has enabled Bootsnap by default. This should make repeated invocations of brew much faster.

Deprecations

• Homebrew 4.5’s various deprecations/disables/removals
• The Ubuntu 18 Docker image has been removed

Other changes since 4.4.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• brew install --ask and HOMEBREW_ASK allow viewing the packages, dependencies and sizes in a prompt before installation
• brew install --skip-link allows installation without running brew link
• brew update-if-needed provides a much faster possible replacement for brew update that does nothing if no auto-update is required
• brew install --as-dependency allows installation of formulae as dependencies rather than “on request”
• brew allows being run by root in podman containers
• HOMEBREW_TEMP defaults to /var/tmp on Linux, assuming it exists, is readable and is writable
• brew install --cask produces fewer GitHub Actions warnings
• Homebrew supports GCC 15
• brew pyenv-sync creates major version symlinks to fix pyenv support
• The Homebrew macOS .pkg installer will upgrade existing installations
• HOMEBREW_UPGRADE_GREEDY_CASKS allows specifying a list of casks that should always be upgraded with --greedy
• Formulae can include PowerShell (pwsh) or clap completions.
• @@HOMEBREW_PREFIX@@ can be replaced with the value of HOMEBREW_PREFIX in external patches
• brew alias and brew unalias commands are part of Homebrew/brew rather than an external tap
• brew edit and brew bundle edit look for VSCode variants, e.g. Cursor
• brew bump* can bump synced formulae together
• brew *env-sync has a HOMEBREW_ENV_SYNC_STRICT mode for stricter version handling
• In formulae and casks, deprecate!/disable! support specifying replacement software and can specify replacement type
• brew bump-* only warns, rather than errors, on duplicate PRs for non-official taps
• brew verify allows verifying package attributions
• brew audit flags pkg-config dependencies in core tap. We have fully moved to using pkgconf in Homebrew/homebrew-core instead.
• Formulae allow using Sequoia’s jq instead of Homebrew’s
• brew config prints the current Homebrew/brew branch
• Homebrew’s Tabs/INSTALL_RECEIPT.json include the bottle_rebuild in runtime_dependencies
• Homebrew will use macOS’s new lockf where available
• Homebrew’s CI is no longer running brew tests on macOS 13. It was too slow and we’re dropping macOS 13 support later this year.

Finally:

• Homebrew has switched to SSH-based Git commit signing
• Homebrew has provided FAQs about their relationship with Workbrew
• 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.

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