4.0.0 — Homebrew

16 February 2023

Today, I’d like to announce Homebrew 4.0.0. The most significant change since 3.6.0 enables significantly faster Homebrew-maintained tap updates by migrating from Git-cloned taps to JSON downloads.

Major changes and deprecations since 3.6.0:

Using JSON files downloaded from formulae.brew.sh for package installation rather than local homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps.

• Please note: this is the largest change we have made to our update process since we split Homebrew/brew and Homebrew/homebrew-core repositories. Please bear with us, there may be a few bumps.
• If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE, HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API or HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS to work around bugs or annoyances: please consider unsetting these and tweaking the values based on the new behaviour.
• Unless you are developing formulae or casks, you can brew untap homebrew/core and brew untap homebrew/cask to save some space.
• brew update will now be run automatically less often (every 24 hours rather than every 5 minutes) and these auto-updates will be much faster as they no longer need to perform the slow git fetch of the huge homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps’ Git repositories.
• This is now the default behaviour so the HOMEBREW_INSTALL_FROM_API variable has been removed and is a no-op.
• If you wish to opt-out of this behaviour change, you can export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1. Please investigate HOMEBREW_API_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS first.
• This behaviour is automatically disabled when using certain commands or in configurations that mostly build from source.
• HOMEBREW_API_DOMAIN can be set to use mirrors for formulae.brew.sh.