An easy, convenient way to automatically update Homebrew.
This script will run brew update in the background once every 24 hours (by
default) until explicitly told to stop, utilising launchd.
brew upgrade and brew cleanup can also be handled automatically, but
are optional flags.
Notifications are enabled by default using a new, code-signed, universal AppleScript applet.
Just brew tap domt4/autoupdate.
Now run brew autoupdate start [interval] [options] to enable autoupdate.
brew autoupdate start 43200 --upgrade --cleanup --immediate --sudo
This will upgrade all your casks and formulae every 12 hours and on every system boot.
If a sudo password is required for an upgrade, a GUI to enter your password will be displayed.
Also, it will clean up every old version and left-over files.
Casks that have built-in auto-updates enabled by default will not be upgraded.
Usage: brew autoupdate subcommand [interval] [options]
An easy, convenient way to automatically update Homebrew.
This script will run brew update in the background once every 24 hours (by
default) until explicitly told to stop, utilising launchd.
brew autoupdate start [interval] [options]:
Start autoupdating either once every interval hours or once every 24
hours. Please note the interval has to be passed in seconds, so 12 hours would
be brew autoupdate start 43200. If you want to start the autoupdate
immediately and on system boot, pass --immediate. Pass --upgrade or
--cleanup to automatically run brew upgrade and/or brew cleanup
respectively.
brew autoupdate stop:
Stop autoupdating, but retain plist and logs.
brew autoupdate delete:
Cancel the autoupdate, delete the plist and logs.
brew autoupdate status:
Print the current status of this tool.
brew autoupdate version:
Output this tool's current version, and a short changelog.
--upgrade Automatically upgrade your installed
formulae. If the Caskroom exists locally then
casks will be upgraded as well. Must be
passed with start.
--greedy Upgrade casks with --greedy (include
auto-updating casks). Must be passed with
start.
--cleanup Automatically clean Homebrew's cache and
logs. Must be passed with start.
--enable-notification Notifications are enabled by default on macOS
Catalina and newer. This flag is no longer
required and can be safely dropped.
--immediate Starts the autoupdate command immediately and
on system boot, instead of waiting for one
interval (24 hours by default) to pass first.
Must be passed with start.
--sudo If a cask requires sudo, autoupdate will
open a GUI to ask for the password. Requires
https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/pinentry-mac
to be installed.
-d, --debug Display any debugging information.
-q, --quiet Make some output more quiet.
-v, --verbose Make some output more verbose.
-h, --help Show this message.Logs of the performed operations can be found at: ~/Library/Logs/com.github.domt4.homebrew-autoupdate
This command mostly exists to ensure Homebrew is updated regardless of whether
you invoke brew or not, which is the primary difference from the autoupdate
mechanism built into brew, the latter requiring a user to explicitly run
any of brew install, brew tap or brew upgrade.
If you run brew commands regularly yourself, you may wish to consider using
the built-in autoupdate mechanism, which can be instructed to autoupdate less
often, or disabled entirely. If you wish to update every 24 hours using the
built-in autoupdate mechanism set this in your environment:
export HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS="86400"or if you wish to disable the built-in autoupdate mechanism entirely:
export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE="1"Please note that Homebrew slightly frowns upon people disabling the built-in autoupdate mechanism.
This tap was created by DomT4 in April 2015 to address a personal desire for a background updater, before being moved to the Homebrew organisation in April 2021 to become an official part of the project after gaining somewhat widespread usage, something I'm both surprised by, but also very appreciative of people finding a small tool I wrote so useful & contributing their own ideas and time towards.
It was in late 2023 moved back to DomT4's ownership to reduce the burden on the wider Homebrew leadership team in terms of maintenance/support requests.
Code is under the BSD 2 Clause (NetBSD) license.
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