Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
354 points - today at 1:24 PM
Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. The most significant changes since 5.1.0 are a new tap trust security mechanism, the new faster, smaller, default internal Homebrew JSON API, sandboxing on Linux, better defaults informed by our user survey, many brew bundle improvements, improved performance and initial support for macOS 27 (Golden Gate).
Happy to discuss any questions here!
Hi Mike, I’m @bfontaine on GitHub (I helped maintain Homebrew in ~2014-2016). I’m always impressed at your longevity as a maintainer; it’s been like what, 16+ years you’ve been maintaining Homebrew and you’re still here, still shipping new features! Thank you for everything!
mikemcquaid
today at 5:54 PM
17 in September. Thanks for all your great work at the time! Hope you’re well <3
Homebrew is so good that I use it on Linux whenever possible.
Most Linux package managers cannot separate user-installed packages from system packages. This makes cleaning up your workstation nearly impossible and a pain in the ass, since you can't tell what should be removed, or more importantly, what can be removed.
Also, most native package managers update much slower than Homebrew, meaning you often only get outdated packages.
PufPufPuf
today at 5:43 PM
I have switched my full OS-level dev env to https://mise.jdx.dev/ from Homebrew+pipx+npm, initially as an experiment but found out that it actually works amazingly well. Many things get installed directly from GitHub releases or a corresponding package manager (uv, pnpm, go get ...), zero glue code to "repackage", zero version lag. You can install any arbitrary version of a package, even multiple ones at once, and dynamically adjust which ones are active per working folder or explicitly through environments.
Funnily Mise does not support dependencies, and I was quite surprised that it mostly doesn't matter, as either pnpm/uv handles that, or it's a static binary that just works. In the past, had the unfortunate experience of packaging a Python application for Homebrew (the ridiculous process involved importing around 50 dependencies as "resources", building every single one from source or manually checking if it's already on Homebrew, declaring build toolchains for 5 different programming languages as dependencies, waiting over an hour for CI to finish on every update, then an upstream update introduced a "build-time dependency loop" and the project suddenly became unpackable for Homebrew) so I totally get why Mise took the "easy way out" and just relies on language-specific package managers directly.
Only thing from my Brewfile that I couldn't replace was the Docker CLI (needed to interact with Colima). And I still use Homebrew for casks. I encourage others to experiment with their dev setups, there are some amazing new tools out there.
mise kind of supports dependencies, just not in the way people expect coming from any other package manager. The dependencies in mise are not automatic and all of them need to be manually defined. They're to get around ordering issues since mise installs in parallel, e.g.: if you use "pipx:black" you need to wait for python to finish installing. (This is the "depends" option on tools")
This is intentional as mise is not intended to be a full bootstrapping solution in the way homebrew/nix is, mise is designed to be an overlay on top of existing systems. So if you want to manage python with brew and black with mise it basically just works without extra configuration. I think this design decision has paid off in spades. It sounds like a drawback but at the end of the day it's probably the #1 reason users find mise easy to use.
nesarkvechnep
today at 6:35 PM
I did the same but with Nix.
threecheese
today at 6:10 PM
Do you have an example? Sounds interesting.
Don't forget that mise depends on package registries, to install itself as well as its tools.
PufPufPuf
today at 5:56 PM
Mise installs itself as a static binary actually (but it's of course packaged in many registries), and while there are some third party registries it delegates to for some packages (aqua, asfd), most stuff I have installed is either built-in, or from PyPI, npm or GitHub, i.e. directly published by the upstream maintainers. More info: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/backends/
sieabahlpark
today at 6:15 PM
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Thanks for all the hard work.
We are not many [1], but Homebrew has been a great way to quickly bootstrap an environment in immutable Linux distributions.
Note that certain operating systems such as Universal Blue's Bazzite (1.28%), Bluefin (0.49%) and Aurora (0.28%) default to bundling Homebrew [2].
[1] https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/os-version/365d/
[2] https://github.com/ublue-os/brew
PufPufPuf
today at 6:06 PM
The concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago. It's ridiculous that the usual situation for non-root users is "you can't install XY but feel free to build from source". Homebrew, Mise and Nix are filling that hole now. (Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps, and Snap... exists.)
bluebarbet
today at 6:39 PM
In Debian-Ubuntu it's become a standard pattern to use `curl` to add a third-party `deb` repo with keychain integration, because for whatever reason there's still no `apt` command for this obvious scenario. Really grinds my gears.
mikepurvis
today at 6:44 PM
One of the frustrating limits historically with some of these is that when you're already an unprivileged user it's been difficult or impossible to get to a sandboxed environment to perform hermetic or untrusted builds. So like with nix for example you could do a user install and then builds would build as your user, but if you installed as root, then builds would delegate out properly to nixbld users.
This has gotten better in recent years with user namespaces but it takes time for it to be adopted and achieve parity with what used to be just jumping to a user who can only write to a newly created dir in tmp.
cosmic_cheese
today at 6:25 PM
At the very least, Linux package managers should have some concept of different layers of packages.
For example, there might be layers for “system” (core components), “environment” (display manager, DE, etc), and “user”, each of which are maintained fully separately so they can’t ever step on each others’ toes and break things. Yes, it means there will be some redundancy but for all the trouble and complexity it’s saving I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
Well, there was stow/xstow...
https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
https://xstow.sourceforge.net/
shevy-java
today at 6:39 PM
Stow only symlinks. That's even one layer below GoboLinux, and GoboLinux is not extremely active either (it is not dead, but kind of semi-dormant, that is sometimes a few changes and improvements are added, then it goes back to hibernation again).
shevy-java
today at 6:39 PM
PufPufPuf wrote:
> The concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago.
Each one uses their own package manager right?
What I hate is that e. g. debian puts me to conform to their FHS. I want things installed into versioned AppDirs. GoboLinux allows that; NixOS to some extent too (though they used hashed directory names). Debian does not allow me to do that. I don't want to conform to what others wrote; I want software that adjusts to my wants.
> Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps
Have they not recently added a mandatory systemd dependency? I can't use software that things it must force software I don't need or use onto me.
QuercusMax
today at 6:18 PM
I haven't looked much into snap but it seems very heavyweight from the few things I've tried, which downloaded what looked like an entire OS and filled up my disk and RAM. And the fact that you run `snapd` to install a package is just... odd.
I'm using nix on Bazzite, with home-manager
terminalbraid
today at 6:47 PM
How do you square advocating for the "Open Source Resistance" which touts "stop asking for permission" to do software and then saying "we need everything on MacOS to be signed and will be dropping packages that don't get Apple's permission"?
I'd consider donating, but I find that behavior to be part of squeezing free computing and participating in and advocating for the corporate erosion of ownership of one's hardware environment.
nosioptar
today at 6:48 PM
I used OSX for about a year about 10 years ago. Homebrew was what made it worth using OSX. Thanks for all the effort put into homebrew.
I'd use it today on Linux, but I'm pretty anal about only using software from the distribution repos (or compiled locally if not available.)
I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are:
- Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained,
- Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing,
- Better UX.
Obviously I miss the reproducibility of Nix environments and the ability to easily create my own flakes with specific packages, but on the balance, Brew has won me back. (I still like Nix, and FWIW we use Nix at work.)
mikemcquaid
today at 6:26 PM
Very glad to hear this, thanks for posting.
Homebrew is so good that I use it on Linux whenever possible.
Most Linux package managers cannot separate user-installed packages from system packages. This makes cleaning up your workstation nearly impossible and a pain in the ass, since you can't tell what should be removed, or more importantly, what can be removed.
Also, most native package managers update much slower than Homebrew, meaning you often only get outdated packages.
Thanks for the update. Is there any chance we can get some kind of cooldown mechanism in Homebrew?
The only people I want to trust to quickly ship new code to my machine are Apple and my browser (which handles more untrusted input than anything else).
For everything else (vscode and its extensions, npm, homebrew, and all the apps that self-update), I prefer to err on the side of waiting a few days.
Some exceptional 0days might warrant a cooldown bypass, but even in its current form users are vulnerable to 0days until they run brew upgrade.
mikemcquaid
today at 5:44 PM
https://docs.brew.sh/Supply-Chain-Security details how we’re handling cooldowns and why we have a very different risk profile to e.g. NPM.
Also, where we package things from NPM/PyPi/RubyGems that have been subject to these attacks: we already apply cooldowns for you both when packaging and when creating PRs to update to new versions.
That doc is very useful and confidence inspiring in terms of being mainly about people and process, rather than about one single technical solution.
Relevant parts for those who have cool-downs at the top of mind:
> Across Homebrew’s history far more users have been protected by shipping zero-day fixes quickly than have been exposed to npm-style token-theft or crypto-mining attacks, so a global cooldown would be a net negative for most users’ security. The deeper reason Homebrew does not need a general cooldown is that, unlike language package managers, it already separates publishing from distribution: an upstream release does not reach users until it has passed human review, CI and checksum verification, which is the very review window that language-ecosystem cooldowns are trying to recreate.
[...]
> For ecosystems with a track record of fast-moving supply-side attacks, Homebrew applies a download cooldown: a freshly-published upstream version is not adopted immediately, giving the wider community time to detect and report a malicious release before Homebrew users are exposed. Cooldowns have been added for:
Bundler
RubyGems livecheck
npm and pip defaults
PyPI resource resolution
npm and PyPI in bump
Glad to see that Homebrew is taking security seriously. Still, I want to minimize the number of parties who can quickly get new code onto my machine.
Your doc says "Human review of each release." What does that actually entail?
uv had a release at 10:21am yesterday with 7,060 additions and 2,409 deletions. The new release was available in homebrew at 11:46am. What human review happened there?
I don't know of any other OS package manager that ships code this quickly to users. Arch Linux has not pushed the new release of uv yet, for example.
mikemcquaid
today at 6:14 PM
Our automation or a human submitted a PR, it was built and tested in our sandboxed ephemeral CI environments, a human Homebrew maintainer reviewed the CI results and PR diff and approved it for merge which happened automatically if so.
If the ask is "who reviewed the diff": yes, a human didn't do that. That's not actually happening for all packages in any meaningful large ecosystem. I'm still unconvinced a cooldown solves that until e.g. we have an open source security scanner that runs on all Homebrew packages and requires a cooldown. Even in that case, my suggestion would be that we just run it in our own CI and block package release.
> Even in that case, my suggestion would be that we just run it in our own CI and block package release.
I agree.
> open source security scanner that runs on all Homebrew packages and requires a cooldown.
I think that is where all this is going in the longterm.
Until then, any upstream shenanigans are more likely to surface in hours 0-48 after a new release than hours 0-4.
+1
For those who don't know what broxit is talking about, they're referring to something like --minimum-release-age/minimumReleaseAge in many pieces of software and package managers to reduce vulnerability to supply chain attacks. Often times, such attacks are detected within a few days of compromise.
Here's Bun's, as an example: https://bun.com/docs/pm/cli/install#minimum-release-age
Most handle this by having release channels. You would `brew set-channel stable/edge`.
It annoyed me this week because I only had a few minutes to try elixir 1.20 after the announcement, and brew lagged behind. You can install erl and elixir by other means (I prefer to run my own toolchains) but it wasn’t worth doing in that moment.
Brew has or used to have a source option for some recipes and that basicallllly solves it too, if you squint.
briandoll
today at 5:41 PM
It's in this release, see this section:
> Cooldowns, livecheck and bumping
PufPufPuf
today at 5:47 PM
That's only for upstream packages, i.e. what the CI pulls in when building bottles. Homebrew itself is a rolling package manager, essentially only supporting the "latest" version for each package, which doesn't work well with the usual "only install packages older than X" concept.
airwarmedd
today at 6:49 PM
damn, I can't believe, it's still getting updates. found out homebrew 6 months ago, I'm awe! amazing product
philistine
today at 6:15 PM
The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!
I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.
If anything, the overwhelming majority of Apple enthusiasts have gone all-in on Apple Silicon. I sincerely doubt those using old Macs as servers are anything but a rounding error.
Maybe among the general mac population they are a rounding error. But among the mac population who actually peeks behind the curtain and uses homebrew?
sunaookami
today at 6:35 PM
Yeah they also removed support for --no-quarantine flag :/ I only use it for a few casks nowadays and try to avoid Homebrew as much as possible. For CLI stuff I use Nix, Home-Manager and Nix-Darwin.
Just want to thank you, Mike. I love Homebrew and wouldn't know what to do without it. My company sponsor's the project on github and I recommend that everyone consider helping out.
Thanks for all the work you put into this over the years. Homebrew became my go-to solution for installing software on my Macs (after MacPorts) and I just realized that someone has been doing all that work for me for so long. Much appreciated!
Is it true that contributors to homebrew need to know how to invert a binary tree?
chuckreynolds
today at 6:33 PM
Brew is so good... just sponsored on github. Thanks for the hard work!
swiftcoder
today at 5:54 PM
Congrats on the performance improvements. That's the most pleasant `brew upgrade` session I've had in years
shawkinaw
today at 6:23 PM
Could really use a good rollback mechanism, is there one in the works perchance? I have broken my home server multiple times with bad InfluxDB and Grafana updates, and rollback was a huge pain. I’ve now disabled cleanup so old versions of packages are kept, but there must be a better way.
7839284023
today at 4:15 PM
Awesome! Thank you for the update.
I noticed that homebrew updated _all_ my casks when running 'brew upgrade' (even those with "auto_updates: true" in their Cask JSON API).
Is this intended, new default behavior?
This did not use to happen...
perryprog
today at 5:22 PM
You need to set HOMEBREW_NO_UPGRADE_AUTO_UPDATES_CASKS to 1, as alluded to by a hint when it (first?) occurs. This means if you have hints off (via HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS) then I suspect you can start getting this behavior without warning which is a bummer.
See also: https://docs.brew.sh/FAQ#why-arent-some-apps-included-during...
> This means if you have hints off (via HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS) then I suspect you can start getting this behavior without warning which is a bummer.
I read this as "This means if you close your eyes you don’t see things, which is a bummer."
reaperducer
today at 5:48 PM
This means if you have hints off (via HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS) then I suspect you can start getting this behavior without warning which is a bummer.
When you instruct the system not to tell you things, the system not telling you those things is a bummer?
If I could get more of the tech I interact with to stop doing things I didn't ask it to, it would reduce a lot of stress and wasted time.
perryprog
today at 5:56 PM
Ah, I suppose I did word that poorly—I more mean that a significant breaking change (Casks that previously were documented as being excluded from auto-updating suddenly being auto-updated) which can occur silently is a rough end-user experience, even if the user explicitly opted into hiding hints.
mikemcquaid
today at 5:45 PM
Yes this is intended. We skip those that seem to have already auto-updated underneath. Our code for this is not yet rock solid so please file issues for those you notice are not doing the right thing here.
ansonhoyt
today at 5:13 PM
Is there a way to `brew trust` inside my Brewfile? That'd be nice for the handful of formulas I install from github repos via `brew bundle --global`.
`brew tap/recipe, trusted: true`
jamesgill
today at 6:20 PM
I know this runs on Linux too. As a Linux user, I'm unclear on why I might use this instead of apt or dnf, for example. Any Linux users out there have experience with both Homebrew and one of these?
Homebrew provides access to a massive catalog of software, including many tools that are not packaged for Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu. Homebrew relies on a high level of automation in GitHub actions, which ensures users get the latest versions of tools quickly, rather than waiting for distribution-specific repositories. The Homebrew approach also decouples the underlying system from what you choose to install in user-space.
Thanks for producing such an amazing piece of software. Most of my Mac installations are based on Homebrew, but I have to rely on version management tools like Pyenv or nvm for Python and Node. Wish there was some standard 'Homebrew' way to install multiple versions of node, php and Python
mikemcquaid
today at 6:16 PM
There's a selection of ways that may or may not work for you:
- `formula@version` packages
- `brew version-install` (which uses `brew extract` and `brew tap-new` under the hood)
- `version_file:` support in `brew bundle
- `brew pyenv-sync`
threecheese
today at 6:09 PM
I assume this trust issue is related to the not-infrequent MacOS notifications asking for permission to run Ruby in the background or when the machine starts. It says nothing about Homebrew though.
macOS Permission Management regarding shell scripts is so bad. For example they show you a list of software thats allowed to access the full disk - but I have like 8 "sh" or "bash" in there and some random scripts with no way to open the enclosing directory in Finder making it basically impossible to see what it is and if its legit…
0xbadcafebee
today at 5:37 PM
Personally I stopped using Homebrew after I got screwed too many times on mandatory upgrades that I couldn't pin. I use a combination of Mise and MacPorts now so I don't get any more surprise breakage and forced obsolescence. Plus Mise allows me to upgrade to any new version, whereas with Homebrew you have to wait for whenever the tap feels like upgrading (llama.cpp tap skips every 10 releases)
frollogaston
today at 6:38 PM
I switched to MacPorts because of permission issues with brew, used it for years, then switched back after MacPorts inexplicably started wanting to install like 9000 packages just to install something small-ish like wget.
ryandrake
today at 6:31 PM
I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.
1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers
mikemcquaid
today at 6:17 PM
Glad you've found a workflow that works for you, genuinely.
For others still using Homebrew: a lot of work has gone into upgrading only when we absolutely have to and showing these upgrades to the user before we do them, including in this release.
PufPufPuf
today at 6:10 PM
I'm in the "switched most to Mise" stage, might look into MacPorts for the remaining stuff, thanks for the tip!
Nix is also worth checking out, even if the Darwin packaging is a bit flaky. I really appreciate having cross-platform devshells when I have to alternate between Mac and Linux on a regular basis.
PufPufPuf
today at 6:12 PM
Mise is also cross-platform, we actually use it at work for projects we develop locally on macOS, then build in CI on Linux -- it even supports multiplatform lockfiles. I had a few tries with Nix but it's a lot to wrap your head around, Mise is simple to "just try".
Interesting that the `brew-rs` experiment has concluded and didn't find much of a performance increase. I suppose that is expected though with a lot of the bottleneck being network IO?
Is the eventual goal to move most formula/cask behavior into declarative install steps and treat Ruby as an escape hatch?
mikemcquaid
today at 5:47 PM
Yes, exactly. The goal is you can install all official packages without needing custom postinstall/preflight/postflight blocks.
Does Homebrew have good support for exact (and older) versions of packages now?
PufPufPuf
today at 6:13 PM
Nope, still rolling. Have a look at https://mise.jdx.dev/ if you need exact versions
mikemcquaid
today at 6:17 PM
`brew version-install` may do what you want here.
c-hendricks
today at 6:12 PM
I don't think that's a part of its goals at all.
shevy-java
today at 6:36 PM
Has anyone tried it on Linux? It has been several months
since I last tried it on Linux. I found some things worked
but others did not. Has anyone more recent experiences here,
say, within the last 6 months, on Linux specifically?
I am using my own custom "package" manager in ruby, but
naturally it is nowhere near as sophisticated as homebrew.
I am looking more towards complementing this, but these days
I also lack time for more thorough testing, so I try to
minimize pain points (and thus also less frequently use
software written by others for the most part, unless it
is a key project such as libreoffice and what not).
paulddraper
today at 6:28 PM
I tried hosting a homebrew tap, after hosting apt and yum repositories.
That was when I realized Homebrew is much, much harder.
Your server needs to implement the git protocol. You can't just stick it on some server with a CDN in front of it, you need to run and fortify a git server.
Strange choices IMHO.
covratools
today at 6:36 PM
Thank you!!
homebrew is so nice, thank you for all your effort
reactordev
today at 5:31 PM
Hell yeah, tap trust!!!
happy Bluefin Linux user and can vouch that the Homebrew experience in Linux is great as well. Really excited for where things are going.
phplovesong
today at 6:16 PM
Does homebrew still do that insane thing when you want to upgrade a single package it tell you "hold my beer" and starts installing postgres and some obscure python version?
yurlyCLOCLOCK
today at 5:59 PM
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