Homebrew is perhaps one of the best tools you can install on your Mac, giving you access to thousands of packages for command-line applications and other utilities. Now, Homebrew is reaching version 4.1, and there’s a lot of changes to be excited about.
If you’re not familiar with what Homebrew is or why should you even have it on your Mac, it’s a package manager for macOS that streamlines the process of installing and managing command-line tools and applications, especially ones popular in the Linux and Unix world (like tree, wget, youtube-dl, etc.). Homebrew gives you access to a slew of open-source software and libraries, which makes it a convenient option for setting up development environments, utilities, setup scripts, and more. Basically, if you’re going to install any kind of command-line tool, Homebrew usually makes the job easier.
Homebrew 4.1.0, which was just announced by the development team, has a few helpful improvements. Notably, we now have a more robust JSON API, utilizing signed API endpoints with client signature verification for safer brew downloads. Additionally, Homebrew now fetches package installation data from formulae.brew.sh, reducing reliance on local taps and enhancing efficiency.
A major milestone achieved by the team is the successful migration of analytics from Google Analytics to InfluxDB, hosted in the EU, ensuring user data remains secure and compliant. As a result, users who previously opted out of analytics due to privacy concerns can now think again about their decision and potentially even opt back in, as your data won’t end up in the grubby hands of Google.
Homebrew has also made strides in improving package management performance. Fetching bottles is now significantly faster, and so is installing packages without using post_install. The update also facilitates automatic syncing of Homebrew-installed versions of Ruby, NodeJS, and Python with rbenv, nodenv, and pyenv, streamlining the process and avoiding unnecessary source builds.
Also worth mentioning is that this update is paving the way for support for macOS Sonoma, due to launch by the end of this year. We definitely recommend you to read the full changelog to know exactly what’s changing and what’s not, as there’s really a lot to go over — and of course, if you’re a Homebrew user (or the description at the beginning of this post made you interested in checking it out), download it now.
Source: Homebrew
