Managing your Homebrew packages on MacOS

Do you know what you services you are running or what tools are installed on your macbook? How many packages do you think are installed?

Homebrew Bundle is a way to manage your Homebrew packages repeatably and predictably. This helps us to manage our Homebrew packages in an automated fashion.

Bundle

A bundle you create using the brew bundle command. This will let you create a dump of the taps, packages and casks currently present on your system.

This dump we will later use to bring the system in sync at a regular interval.

$ brew bundle dump --file ~/Brewfile

If you want to add anything later, you can do this two ways.

• Install the package and create a new dump
• Add the entry to ~/Brewfile and re-install

Re-installing from the ~/Brewfile manually can be done with this command.

$ brew bundle install --file ~/Brewfile --clean

+ Launchd

Launchd will help us to bring the system in sync on a set interval. This way, any ad-hoc installs of packages will be reverted at the end of every day.

Replace [user] with the username on your machine and save it to
~/Library/LaunchAgents/sh.brew.bundle_sync.plist

Use this command to load the service.
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/sh.brew.bundle_sync.plist.

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>sh.brew.bundle_sync</string>
  
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/usr/local/bin/brew</string>
  
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/local/bin/brew</string>
      <string>bundle</string>
      <string>install</string>
      <string>--file</string>
      <string>/Users/[user]/Brewfile</string>
      <string>--clean</string>
    </array>
  
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/Users/[user]/Brewfile.launchd.stdout</string>
  
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/Users/[user]/Brewfile.launchd.stderr</string>
  
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Hour</key>
      <integer>10</integer>
    </dict>
  </dict>
</plist>