Useful homebrew commands

As as a frequent user of Homebrew on macOS, I find myself using the same few commands over and over. For that reason, I’ve listed those commands with a short explanation of each, so others don’t need to trawl the web or read the man pages.

Once you’ve got Homebrew installed, you can update Homebrew itself with the command:

$ brew update

Now that we’re up to date, we can manage our formulae with Homebrew. I’ll normally install Git, Hugo, Python, Ruby (rbenv), Trash, Yarn and various ZSH plugins; so you’ll see those in my examples.

Install a formula

$ brew install git

Find other formula

Outside of the standard Homebrew list of formulae, you can access other repositories of formulae for other functions. An example of this would be the Homebrew PHP “tap” which can be installed by accessing three taps:

# https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-php#installation
$ brew tap homebrew/dupes
$ brew tap homebrew/versions
$ brew tap homebrew/homebrew-php

You will now be able to access a lot of new PHP formulae.

List installed formulae

# Show the individual packages installed
$ brew list
# returns:
autoconf    node          rbenv         yarn
gdbm        openssl       readline      z
git         pcre          ruby-build    zsh
hugo        pkg-config    sqlite        zsh-completions
icu4c       python        trash         zsh-syntax-highlighting


# Show each of the full formulae installed
$ brew leaves
# returns:
git
hugo
python
rbenv
trash
yarn
z
zsh
zsh-completions
zsh-syntax-highlighting

Find outdated formulae

$ brew outdated
# If nothing is returned to the terminal, you're up-to-date.

Update a formula or update everything

# Update a specific formula (e.g. Git)
$ brew upgrade git

# Upgrade all formula
$ brew upgrade

Uninstall a formula

$ brew uninstall git

Uninstall everything

$ brew remove --force --ignore-dependencies $(brew list)

Clean up old formulae

# List forumlas that can be cleaned up
$ brew cleanup -n

# Remove all old formulae
$ brew cleanup

# Remove old symlinks
$ brew prune

Get help with formulae

Homebrew has a built-in doctor which will let you know if everything is working correctly. If not, it will output an error message that you can hopefully use to diagnose the issue.

$ brew doctor

Use a GUI

The alternative to remembering all of these commands is using a GUI. For those who want a GUI, Cakebrew seems to be the best option.