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rhunter edited this page Jul 9, 2012 · 52 revisions

How do I update my local packages?

First update the formula and Homebrew itself:

brew update

You can now find out what is outdated with:

brew outdated

Upgrade everything with:

brew upgrade

Or upgrade a specific formula with:

brew upgrade foo

How do I uninstall Homebrew?

If you installed to /usr/local then you can use the script in this gist to uninstall — it will only remove Homebrew and the stuff Homebrew installed leaving anything else in /usr/local alone.

Homebrew doesn’t write files outside its prefix. As long as you haven’t mixed put anything else in the Homebrew directory, you can generally just rm -rf the folder you installed it in.

Where does stuff get downloaded?

`brew --cache`

Which is usually: ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew

My GUI .apps don’t find /usr/local/bin utilities!

GUI apps on OS X don’t have /usr/local/bin in their PATH by default. You fix this by following these instructions: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa1067/_index.html.

Note that you should put /usr/local/bin after /usr/bin because some programs will expect to get the system version of eg. ruby, and break if they get the newer Homebrew version.

How do I contribute to Homebrew?

See the Formula Cookbook.

bad interpreter: /usr/bin/ruby^M: no such file or directory

You cloned with git, and your git configuration is set to use Windows line endings. Don’t do that.

bad interpreter: /usr/bin/ruby

You don’t have a /usr/bin/ruby or it is not executable. It’s not recommended to let this persist, you’d be surprised how many .apps, tools and scripts expect your OS X provided files and directories to be unmodified since OS X was installed.

Why are you compiling everything?

Projects distribute source tarballs, generally, but if they provide a good binary, we’ll use it. Though we don’t always, because Homebrew is about homebrewing, it’s half the point that you can just brew edit foo and change how the formula is compiled to your own specification.

Homebrew does provide pre-compiled versions for some formula that take a long time to compile (such as Qt which can take many hours to build). These pre-compiled versions are referred to as bottles and are available at:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/machomebrew/files

If available, bottled binaries will be used by default except under the following conditions:

  • Options were passed to the the install command. I.E. brew install foo will use a bottled version of foo, but brew install foo --enable-bar will trigger a source build.
  • The --build-from-source option is invoked.
  • The environment variable HOMEBREW_BUILD_FROM_SOURCE is set.
  • The machine is not running OS X 10.7.x as all bottled builds are generated on Lion.

In order to completely disable bottled builds, simply add a value for the environment variable HOMEBREW_BUILD_FROM_SOURCE to your profile.

How do I get a formula from someone else’s branch?

sudo gem install github
brew update
cd $(brew --repository)
github pull someone_else

someone_else is the github username. It assumes a branch named master, if you want a different branch then do github pull someone_else/branch_name.

Why does Homebrew insist I install to /usr/local with such vehemence?

  1. It’s easier
    /usr/local/bin is already in your PATH.
  2. It’s easier
    Tons of build scripts break if their dependencies aren’t in either /usr or /usr/local. We fix this for Homebrew formulae (although we don’t always test for it), but you’ll find that many RubyGems and Python setup scripts break which is something outside our control.
  3. It’s safe
    Apple has conformed to POSIX and left this directory for us. Which means there is no /usr/local directory by default, so there is no need to worry about messing up existing tools.
If you plan to install gems that depend on brews then save yourself a bunch of hassle and install to /usr/local!

It is not trivial to tell gem to look in non-standard directories for headers and dylibs. If you choose /usr/local, everything “just works!”

Why does Homebrew say sudo is bad?

tl;dr Sudo is dangerous, and you installed TextMate.app without sudo anyway.

Homebrew is designed to work without using sudo. You can decide to use it but we strongly recommend not to do so. If you have used sudo and run into a bug then it is likely to be the cause. Please don’t file a bug report unless you can reproduce it after reinstalling Homebrew from scratch without using sudo.

You should only ever sudo a tool you trust. Of course, you can trust Homebrew ;) But do you trust the multi-megabyte Makefile that Homebrew runs? Developers often understand C++ far better than they understand make syntax. It’s too high a risk to sudo such stuff. It could break your base system, or alter it subtly.

And indeed, we’ve seen some build scripts try to modify /usr even when the prefix was specified as something else entirely.

Did you chown root /Applications/TextMate.app? Probably not. So is it that important to chown root wget?

Why isn’t the ___ command documented?

If it’s not in `man brew`, it’s probably an external command. These are documented here.

Why haven’t you pulled my pull request?

If it’s been a while, bump it with a “bump” comment. Sometimes we miss requests and there are plenty of them. Maybe we were thinking on something. It will encourage consideration. In the meantime if you could rebase the pull request so that it can be cherry-picked more easily we will love you long time.

Can I edit formula myself?

Yes! It’s easy! Just brew edit foo. You don’t have to submit modifications back to_mxcl/master_, just edit the formula as you personally need it and brew install. As a bonus brew update will merge your changes with upstream so you can still keep the formula up-to-date with your personal modifications!

Can I make new formula?

Yes! It’s easy! Just brew create URL Homebrew will then open the formula in $EDITOR so you can edit it, but it probably already installs, try it: brew install foo.\

If you want your new formula to be part of mxcl/master or want to learn more about writing formula then please read the Formula Cookbook.

Can I install my own stuff to /usr/local?

Yes, brew is designed to not get in your way so you can use it how you like.

Install your own stuff, but be aware that if you install common libraries, like libexpat yourself, it may cause trouble when trying to build certain Homebrew formula. As a result brew doctor will warn you about this.

Thus it’s probably better to install your own stuff to the Cellar and then brew link it. Like so:

$ cd foo-0.1
$ brew diy
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/foo/0.1
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/foo/0.1
[snip]
$ make && make install
$ brew link foo
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/foo/0.1... 17 symlinks created

Why does the versions command just tell me “fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git”?

If you are relatively new to brew and have not yet had an occasion to do this, run brew update. The versions command needs /usr/local/.git in order to run, and it doesn’t get initialized until you do your first update. If that doesn’t fix it, you may have larger permission- or git-centric problems.

Where did the __ formula go?

Sometimes formula are moved to specialized repositories. These are the likely candidates:

https://github.com/adamv/homebrew-alt
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-dupes
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-versions
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-games

You can use brew tap to access these formulae:

brew tap homebrew/games
brew install ...
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