Homebrew is pretty sweet. I’ve been very pleased with easily keeping my OSX system up to date since it was released; no more Fink/MacPorts, it’s automatable, it just works (well, as long as you keep installing the latest XCode or OSX Command Line Tools).

You are using Homebrew to install and update all your programs, right? If not, checkout the homepage now.

However, when just following the Homebrew repo on GitHub, I think keeping up to date with what is “new” with Homebrew has always been hard. Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention or read enough of the man pages.

So here is an overview of a bunch of new features I found out about recently, including the ability to install GUI OSX applications, via Cask:

Outdated

Despite what I just said about staying up to date, I upgrade specific packages by choice. brew update will get you the latest install scripts, brew oudated will show what versions have changed. For some programs; PostgreSQL, there is associated data that has to be migrated and sometimes I don’t want to upgrade. I usually brew upgrade <package> or multiple packages at once, once I find they are outdated.

Versions

Along the same lines, want to install an old version of a package?

Want to find out which versions there are? brew versions <package> will show the previous versions and allow you to checkout the install script for a previous version.

Install via URL/local file

Found a new install script for a cool package Github, want to test it out quickly? Copy the raw package URL from Github and brew install https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/raw/master/Library/Formula/ace.rb

Or install via local absolute file paths, if you want to download the script and then edit it.

(This was added with Homebrew 0.8 about 18 months ago

Taps

Longterm, you probably don’t want to have a bunch of packages installed from random urls or old versions of install scripts checked out in your Homebrew repo. Also, for the Homebrew maintainers, I guess managing one huge repo of all packages became more difficult as Homebrew grew more popular.

Taps allow you have to setup multiple package repos.

• Versions provides multiple versions of existing packages; python24, python25, python 26. Homebrew official python is only 2.7.3
• Dupes has dupes of OSX system packages
• PHP is a bunch of scripts for making latest PHP easier to install. Overall, I gave up PHP development on OSX and moved to Linux VMs, but maybe there is hope!

Setting up a private repo for your own scripts or company isn’t that hard either, if you wanted to vendor fork a bunch of packages and make use of Homebrew.

Once you’ve added a Tap, brew search and brew install automatically check that repo for packages. brew update will check all Taps for updates as well.

Want to see your installed Taps?

ls `brew --prefix`/Library/Taps

(This was added with Homebrew 0.9 about 9 months ago

Cask

Cask is something I just found today, after trying to replicate it’s functionality in Homebrew. Homebrew is great for system packages, but why not GUI apps and regular OSX programs? Installing downloaded zip/dmg files is what Cask does.

Add the Cask repo brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask and install it to Homebrew brew install brew-cask

Now install Google Chrome, Spotify, Sparrow, iTerm2 in one line brew cask install google-chrome spotify sparrow iterm2 and those apps are now installed and usable.

I just started using this, I have no clue how Sparkle or apps that auto-update themself work with this, but I still think it’s a great idea. The integration isn’t great with Homebrew right now; you have to search Cask apps separately, brew cask search, but hopefully that will improve in the future.

If you use Alfred and wonder why your newly installed apps aren’t showing in Alfred, read the Cask README to the bottom

External Commands

Coincidentally, I didn’t realize the Tap and Cask commands were mostly done via Homebrew’s external command support, ala git. See more here.

To see the currently (probably default) set of available commands

ls `brew --repository`/Library/Contributions/cmd

Services

This is one of the coolest commands I haven’t been using: brew managed wrapper around launchctl. brew services to find out more.

Next time you upgrade redis and get that unload/load message, unload redis, copy the latest launch plist, and then: brew services redis start. You can brew services list to see all of your Homebrew services started under services, no launchctl tinkering.

Happy brewing!