Homebrew Bundle

Bundler for non-Ruby dependencies from Homebrew.

Requirements

Homebrew or Linuxbrew are used for installing the dependencies. Linuxbrew is a fork of Homebrew for Linux, while Homebrew only works on macOS. This tool is developed for use with Homebrew on macOS but might work with Linuxbrew (but is unsupported so don't file Linux issues, please).

Homebrew Cask is optional and used for installing Mac applications.

mas-cli is optional and used for installing Mac App Store applications.

Installation

brew bundle is automatically installed when run.

Usage

Create a Brewfile in the root of your project with:

touch Brewfile

Add your dependencies in your Brewfile:

cask_args appdir: "/Applications"
tap "homebrew/cask"
tap "telemachus/brew", "https://telemachus@bitbucket.org/telemachus/brew.git", pin: true
brew "imagemagick"
brew "mysql@5.6", restart_service: true, link: true, conflicts_with: ["mysql"]
brew "emacs", args: ["with-cocoa", "with-gnutls"]
cask "google-chrome"
cask "java" unless system "/usr/libexec/java_home --failfast"
cask "firefox", args: { appdir: "~/my-apps/Applications" }
mas "1Password", id: 443987910

Install

You can then easily install all of the dependencies with:

brew bundle

If a dependency is already installed and there is an upgrade available it will be upgraded.

brew bundle will look for Brewfile in the current directory. Use --file to specify a path to a different Brewfile.

Dump

You can create a Brewfile from all the existing Homebrew packages you have installed with:

brew bundle dump

The --force option will allow an existing Brewfile to be overwritten as well. The --describe option will output a description comment above each line.

Cleanup

You can also use Brewfile as a whitelist. It's useful for maintainers/testers who regularly install lots of formulae. To uninstall all Homebrew formulae not listed in Brewfile:

brew bundle cleanup

Unless the --force option is passed, formulae that would be uninstalled will be listed rather than actually be uninstalled.

Check

You can check there's anything to install/upgrade in the Brewfile by running:

brew bundle check

This provides a successful exit code if everything is up-to-date so is useful for scripting.

For a list of dependencies that are missing, pass --verbose. This will also check all dependencies by not exiting on the first missing dependency category.

List

Outputs a list of all of the entries in the Brewfile.

brew bundle list

Pass one of --casks, --taps, --mas, or --brews to limit output to that type. Defaults to --brews. Pass --all to see everything.

Note that the type of the package is not included in this output.

Exec

Runs an external command within Homebrew's superenv build environment:

brew bundle exec -- bundle install

This sanitized build environment ignores unrequested dependencies, which makes sure that things you didn't specify in your Brewfile won't get picked up by commands like bundle install, npm install, etc. It will also add compiler flags which will help find keg-only dependencies like openssl, icu4c, etc.

Restarting services

You can choose whether brew bundle restarts a service every time it's run, or only when the formula is installed or upgraded in your Brewfile:

# Always restart myservice
brew 'myservice', restart_service: true

# Only restart when installing or upgrading myservice
brew 'myservice', restart_service: :changed

Note

Homebrew does not support installing specific versions of a library, only the most recent one, so there is no good mechanism for storing installed versions in a .lock file.

If your software needs specific versions then perhaps you'll want to look at using Vagrant to better match your development and production environments.

Tests

Tests can be run with bundle && bundle exec rake spec

Copyright

Copyright (c) Homebrew maintainers and Andrew Nesbitt. See LICENSE for details.