The missing menulet for brew.sh.
This menulet makes it easier to use brew.sh. For example, you need to
manually check if some of your packages can be updated. With Brewlet it's easy:
if everything is working swimmingly, then you'll see the normal shadow
icon. If updates are available to be installed, the icon will become colored,
, to get your attention โ
along with a notification if you wish.
Once clicked, you'll be able to upgrade your packages, among other options.
In addition, Brewlet will periodically check the status of packages in the
background, so you don't have to.
When new versions are available, you can update all of them at once or manually choose specific packages:
Install with brew
on the command line:
brew install brewlet
Or download the latest version from releases or here (zip).
You can upgrade to the latest version by running:
brew update
brew upgrade brewlet
I am currently working on adding more features, listed in order of priority here:
- Ability to handle casks
- Ability to install brew if not found
- About page with detailed information
- Features suggested by community (see Issues).
The update
operation pulls the latest version of Homebrew and updates
the metadata related to packages. From the man
pages:
Fetch the newest version of Homebrew and all formulae from GitHub using git(1) and perform any necessary migrations.
Whereas upgrade
will actually upgrade your outdated packages to the latest
version(s).
Upgrade outdated, unpinned formulae using the same options they were originally installed with, plus any appended brew formula options.
Contributions are welcome!
You can look for logged messages and errors with the Console app, or this command:
$ log show --predicate 'process == "Brewlet"' --info
$ log show --predicate "processID == `pgrep Brewlet`" --info --last 1h
To test for outdated packages, reinstall some older versions from a specific commit. For example:
$ brew uninstall jq
$ brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/b76347c21bbe20accf0a514b138515e30a48ad12/Formula/jq.rb
To generate images of different sizes, use Inkscape on the command line:
$ len=64 # or use a for loop
$ inkscape --export-type="png" \
--export-file brewlet-"$len".png \
-w "$len" \
brewlet.svg
Brew will redirect output of the upgrade
command to a temporary file, you can
use this command to locate it.
$ find /var/folders -type f -name 'brewlet*log' 2> /dev/null
Because this app is closely tied to brew.sh
, I used their icon as a template.
I also decided to adopt their choice of license: BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License.
Brewlet needs to be able to access to:
- the
brew.sh
shell script to get information and take action on your behalf. - access to write to your Downloads folder when exporting a list of packages.
- permissions to send you notifications when updates are available, and when unexpected errors occur.