Homebrew Autoupdate

An easy, convenient way to automatically update Homebrew.

This script will run brew update in the background once every 24 hours (by default) until explicitly told to stop, utilising launchd.

brew upgrade and brew cleanup can also be handled automatically but are optional flags.

Notifications are enabled by default on macOS Big Sur using a new, codesigned, universal AppleScript applet. On older versions of macOS, if you have terminal-notifier installed you can also request desktop notifications when this command runs.

Installing this command

Just brew tap homebrew/autoupdate.

Usage

Usage: brew autoupdate subcommand [interval] [options]

An easy, convenient way to automatically update Homebrew.

This script will run brew update in the background once every 24 hours (by
default) until explicitly told to stop, utilising launchd.

brew autoupdate start [interval] [options]:
    Start autoupdating either once every interval hours or once every 24
hours. Please note the interval has to be passed in seconds, so 12 hours would
be brew autoupdate start 43200. Pass --upgrade or --cleanup to
automatically run brew upgrade and/or brew cleanup respectively. Pass
--enable-notification to send a notification when the autoupdate process has
finished successfully.

brew autoupdate stop:
    Stop autoupdating, but retain plist & logs.

brew autoupdate delete:
    Cancel the autoupdate, delete the plist and logs.

brew autoupdate status:
    Prints the current status of this tool.

brew autoupdate version:
    Output this tool's current version, and a short changelog.

      --upgrade                    Automatically upgrade your installed
                                   formulae. If the Caskroom exists locally
                                   Casks will be upgraded as well. Must be
                                   passed with start.
      --greedy                     Upgrade casks with --greedy. See brew(1).
                                   Must be passed with start.
      --cleanup                    Automatically clean brew's cache and logs.
                                   Must be passed with start.
      --enable-notification        Send a notification when the autoupdate
                                   process has finished successfully, if
                                   terminal-notifier is installed & found.
                                   Must be passed with start.
                                   NOTE: Notifications are enabled by default
                                   on macOS Catalina and newer.
      --immediate                  Starts the autoupdate command immediately,
                                   instead of waiting for one interval (24
                                   hours by default) to pass first. Must be
                                   passed with start.
  -d, --debug                      Display any debugging information.
  -q, --quiet                      Make some output more quiet.
  -v, --verbose                    Make some output more verbose.
  -h, --help                       Show this message.

Logs of the performed operations can be found at: ~/Library/Logs/com.github.domt4.homebrew-autoupdate

This vs brew's built-in autoupdate mechanism

This command mostly exists to ensure Homebrew is updated regardless of whether you invoke brew or not, which is the primary difference from the autoupdate mechanism built into brew, the latter requiring a user to explicitly run any of brew install, brew tap or brew upgrade.

If you run brew commands regularly yourself, you may wish to consider using the built-in autoupdate mechanism, which can be instructed to autoupdate less often or disabled entirely. If you wish to update every 24 hours using the built-in autoupdate mechanism set this in your environment:

export HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS="86400"

or if you wish to disable the built-in autoupdate mechanism entirely:

export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE="1"

Please note that Homebrew slightly frowns upon people disabling the built-in autoupdate mechanism.

TO-DO (PRs Welcome)

• Complete broader testing and roll-out of new, experimental notification support added in 6365cc020 that doesn't require or use any external dependencies, using only an Applescript applet. Related Issue

• Decide what to do about Cask upgrades which require sudo to succeed and currently just hang when that situation is encountered, unless using SUDO_ASKPASS. Related Issue

History

This tap was created by DomT4 in April 2015 to address a personal desire for a background updater, before being moved to the Homebrew organisation in April 2021 to become an official part of the project after gaining somewhat widespread usage, something I'm both surprised by but also very appreciative of people finding a small tool I wrote so useful & contributing their own ideas and time towards.

License

Code is under the BSD 2 Clause (NetBSD) license.