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"To install, drag this icon..." no more!

Let's see if we can get the elegance, simplicity, and speed of Homebrew for the installation and management GUI Mac applications like Google Chrome and Adium.

brew-cask provides a friendly homebrew-style CLI workflow for the administration of Mac applications distributed as binaries.

It's implemented as a homebrew "external command" called cask.

Let's try it!

Install and set up brew-cask

This is still a little ornery. You'll probably want to also see "Known Ugliness" below.

# be sure you have Homebrew installed first

$ git clone https://github.com/phinze/brew-cask
$ ln -s brew-cask/bin/brew-cask.rb ~/bin # or anywhere in your $PATH
$ ln -s brew-cask/Casks /usr/local/Library/

Now let's install something

Let's see if there's a Cask for Chrome:

$ brew cask search chrome
google-chrome

Cool, there it is. Let's install it.

$ brew cask install google-chrome
Downloading...
Success! google-chrome installed to /usr/local/Cellar/google-chrome/17.0.963.56

Now we have Google Chrome.app in our Cellar, let's get it linked somewhere useful:

$ brew cask linkapps
/Users/phinze/Applications/Google Chrome.app -> /usr/local/Cellar/google-chrome/17.0.963.56/Google Chrome.app

And there we have it. Google Chrome installed with a few quick commands; no clicking, no dragging, no dropping.

open "~/Applications/Google Chrome.app"

What is a Cask?

A Cask is like a Formula in Homebrew except it describes how to download and install a binary application.

Casks have two important fields:

url: (required) points to binary distribution of the application
version: (required) describes the version of the application available at the URL

What Casks are available?

Just run brew cask search with no arguments to get a list.

Here's the current list:

alfred
dropbox
google-chrome
keepass-x
nv-alt

What's the status of this project? Where's it headed?

It's really just a start at this point, but it works, and I've got big plans!

brew-cask currently understands how to install dmg and zip files that contain a app file. I'd like to extend it to be able to handle pkg files as well as the numerous other permutations of compression and distribution in the wild (app inside dmg inside zip; folder inside dmg; etc.).

I plan to use the Cask model to allow per-project customization of behavior, like Homebrew does with Formula. This would allow weirdo applications like Eclipse ("really you want me to drag that whole folder to Applications?") to contain their complexity.

Each Cask will then encapsulate and automate the story of how a given application should be installed. If all goes well - I'm hoping to build up a community-maintained collection of Casks that becomes the standard way that hackers install Mac apps.

Known Ugliness

The interactions with Old Uncle Homebrew are a little funky at this point. I'm still playing with sharing Homebrew's Cellar (which we do in the current implementation). This means that cask applications show up in regular old brew list, and can be unlinked and uninstalled by brew. But cask apps are not regular formula, so they won't show up in brew search and brew info will not return anything for you.

So there's some coolness out of playing in @mxcl's playground, but also some confusing behavior. We'll see how it plays out.

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