How to love homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager which a lot of people use, and as software that a lot of people use, a lot of people like to complain about.

I'm not here to tell you not to complain about it, but I do want to share why I love homebrew, and how you might grow to - if not love it - at least find it a part of a productive workflow.

My One Iron Rule of Homebrew

Don't rely on the particular version of something installed via homebrew

Homebrew, in my workflow, has one job: install command line software and keep it up to date. For quite a lot of software, the only thing I care about is "is it up to date" - and this is the software that I install with homebrew.

For example, I use ffmpeg on the command line semi-regularly. ffmpeg has a bunch of dependencies and is generally kind of a pain in the ass to install and keep up to date on its own.

But with homebrew, I just brew install ffmpeg, and if I need to update it, 💥 brew upgrade ffmpeg gets me the newer version. This works great!

Homebrew owns the things it installs

The most common case I see where people get frustrated is when they do something like brew install python, and then start relying on the python version they've just installed for running their own scripts.

In my mental model, when I say brew install python, I am telling homebrew "go ahead and install a version of python for yourself", rather than "install a version of python for me".

Later on, if I were to update some package in homebrew that depends on some other package in homebrew, it would update my python version without telling me, and if I'm depending on that python version, I would be upset because it would either cease to exist or become a broken shell until it gets cleaned up.

When I install a package with homebrew, homebrew owns it and may upgrade it at any time

I use asdf for versions I want to control manually

If I care about the particular version of a program, such as a programming language environment or a database server, I install it myself, either manually or with a tool such as asdf.

When I asdf install python 3.12.1, I have a good mental model of what happens: python version 3.12.1 is downloaded and installed by pyenv to my asdf directory. At that point, I can be confident that version 3.12.1 is going to be available from now until such time as I take some action to uninstall it.

asdf has plugins for most software, and some newer software such as rust can handle this version juggling for me. Here's a brief list of how I install some of the programming environments I care about:

• go: asdf-golang
  • and possibly gotip if I need development versions
• javascript: asdf-nodejs
• postgres: asdf-postgres
• python: asdf-python
• ruby: asdf-ruby
• rust: use rustup
• terraform: asdf-hashicorp

(update: as per several commenters (thanks!) I'm now giving mise a try)

Custom taps are generally reliable

Some software, such as mongodb, provides custom taps for installation.

In my experience, these have been reliable, and I break my "iron rule" for mongo by installing mongodb/brew/mongodb-community@<version> when I need to run mongo.

But that's not as catchy I suppose.

Why do I love homebrew

If it seems like I've laid out a bunch of exceptions and rules to follow to avoid problems, why do I actually like it?

• For software that I just want to stay up to date, which is quite a lot of the software I use at the CLI, homebrew does a great job of keeping it up to date
• homebrew's coverage of modern software releases is extensive
• package versions update nearly immediately, so if I need an updated version of something I rarely have to wait
• many complex package installations are boiled down into brew install <package>
  • An example: gdal is a giant pain to install otherwise
• it can install and keep GUI programs up to date
• creating your own recipes is very simple; see next section

Creating your own custom tap is extremely simple

If I have some software that I'd like to create a recipe for and allow other people to install via homebrew, it's reasonably easy to do.

My github username is llimllib, and an example piece of software I wrote is blisper, which is a CLI and wrapper I wrote around whisper.cpp. Here's how I made it installable via homebrew:

• Created a repository homebrew-whisper
• Added a Formula directory with a pair of formulas in it
  • each is short, declarative, and simple

After that, I can just tell people to run brew install llimllib/whisper/blisper and they should be up and running with my software.

Simplicity

Why I love homebrew is wrapped up in how simple that process is; it isn't fit for everything, but it is simple enough that if you invest a bit of energy into understanding how it works, you can easily comprehend it well.

It's an incomplete package manager that doesn't try to solve every problem - particularly it's uninterested in letting you run a particular version of any given software - but it's very good at solving the problem of installing the most recent version of CLI tools.

I have found the pairing of homebrew and asdf to satisfy my needs as somebody that hacks on a lot of different software in a lot of different ecosystems, and I hope sharing my process and a bit of my mental model might help you figure out something that works well for you.

If you have comments to make, I'm on mastodon and happy to talk about how I use homebrew and asdf, and manage my computer generally.