My Homebrew Tap

Homebrew formulae and/or casks are sometime updated in such a way that things break. On other occasions, homebrew-core suddenly drops some formulae when the associated tool updates too often for instance.

In some occasions the developers offer their own tap, but in others that's not the case. It is exactly for placating this latter scenario that we built our tap. We can now control what we can install and, more importantly, how we install it.

You might find something of interest here or you might just find this interesting as an example for setting up your own tap. Be it what it may, we hope you enjoy taking a look around.

Available casks

• etcher: A flashing tool for SD cards and USB drives. Be sure to check their site.

Available formulae

• botan2: Latest 2.x version of the botan library implementing cryptography and TLS primitives for C++.

How do I install these formulae and casks?

We just need to make the use of this tap explicit when passing the formula name as an argument to brew:

$ brew install pcolladosoto/stuff/<formula>

We can also install the tap (i.e. add it to our local brew client) and then install available casks or formulae:

# We can add the tap...
$ brew tap pcolladosoto/stuff

# And then install stuff as we would usually do:
$ brew install <formula>

Removing the tap

Luckily, removing the tap is just as easy as installing it. The following will do the trick:

$ brew untap pcolladosoto/stuff

My local setup

We actually cloned the repo into the following directory so that we can install formulae and casks before pushing changes to the repo:

$ git clone git@github.com:pcolladosoto/homebrew-stuff.git /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/pcolladosoto/homebrew-stuff

We then added a symbolic link so that we could access the tap in an easier fashion:

$ ln -s /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/pcolladosoto/homebrew-stuff ~/somewhere/nice

Documentation and further reading

You can read up more on brew by taking a look at brew(1) (with man brew) or by taking a look at the online docs. You can also refer to the Formula Cookbook and the Cask Cookbook for further information on how to craft formulae and casks, respectively.

You might also want to consider the Homebrew Ruby API documentation. And specifically the Formula class definition. It's much harder to read than the cookbook, but it offers the best possible insight into what makes Homebrew tick... more technical than the Cookbooks