Major Release of Homebrew After 3.6: What Are the New Changes?

Homebrew 4.0 brought a major update for users with several new feature

The major release of Homebrew 4.0/4.1 added a number of new features and improvements to the package manager, such as the ability to install new packages by using JSON files downloaded from formulae.brew.sh instead of local Homebrew/core and Homebrew/cask tap files.

If you have set HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE, HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API, or HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS, the developer has asked us to unset or tweak these environment variables according to the new change.

Also, the brew update will now run automatically every 24 hours instead of every 5 minutes. Because of the above change, the update process will be faster than the conventional way of fetching from the huge Git repositories for homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps.

With their own self-hosted InfluxDB instance hosted in the EU, they are gradually moving away from Google Analytics in favour of privacy-focused solutions that offer insight into user behaviour without compromising the user’s privacy.

They will complete the migration from Google Analytics to self-hosted InfluxDB within 90 days. After that, they will delete all the data that was stored on the Google Analytics platform.

So, if you set the environment variable HOMEBREW_NO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS, you can remove it now, and it will be routed to their own InfluxDB.

In addition to the above Homebrew changes, you can now use brew install --dry-run option, which lets you see what will be installed along with the package, and the brew install command will now also suggest cask, which earlier showed only formulae.

If you want to read documentation, tips, manuals, or anything else, you can just run brew docs, which will open documentation in your browser.

They have dropped WSL1 support in favour of WSL2, and now the brew doctor command in conjunction with the --quiet option will not print until there are any warnings or errors.

Additional changes are documented in their changelog, which you can access here:

Source: Homebrew blog and Changelog on Github

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