Creating a Homebrew tap

05 Jul 2020

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CREATING A HOMEBREW TAP

Sometimes, you might come across a need to create your own tap for Homebrew, either to host your own tools or for formulae that you tweaked as per your needs. I stumbled upon this path when I was trying to install a deleted formula, and there would be others in my team who would need to do the same. To my surprise, creating a Homebrew tap was surprisingly easy.

Create a Git repository

Create a Git repository that is named starting with homebrew-. This ensures that the short brew tap command can be used. An easy way to create a new tap is by using the brew tap-new command:

brew tap-new aditig/tools

This creates a new tap along with some template files:

aditig
└── homebrew-tools
    ├── Formula
    └── README.md

Add a formula

You can now add a formula myformula.rb to the Formula subdirectory. We’ll not be going into the details of how to write a formula, but a simple formula could look like this:

class MyFormula < Formula
  desc "My formula"
  homepage "https://myformula.com"
  url "https://myformula.com/myformula_1.0.tar.gz"
  sha256 "<sha256>"

  def install
    system "make", "install"
  end

  test do
    system "#{bin}/myformula", "--help"
  end
end

Use the tap

To tap the repository:

brew tap aditig/tools <git-clone-url>

If you’re using Github, you can skip the URL.

You can now install the formula:

brew install myformula

If there are naming conflicts with another formula of the same name, provide the tap details:

brew install aditig/tools/myformula

As you can see, it’s straight-forward to create a Homebrew tap. For an example, look at homebrew-tools. The Homebrew documentation includes more details on how to maintain a tap and writing new formulae.