Homebrew.jl sets up a homebrew installation inside your Julia package directory. It uses Homebrew to provide specialized binary packages to satisfy dependencies for other Julia packages, without the need for a compiler or other development tools; it is completely self-sufficient.

Package authors with dependencies that want binaries distributed in this manner should open an issue here. A Homebrew formula for the dependency you wish to provide will help speed along the process.

As a user, you ideally shouldn't ever have to use Homebrew directly, short of installing it. However, in an effort to be realistic, there is a simple to use interface for interacting with the Homebrew package manager:

• Homebrew.add("pkg") will install pkg
• Homebrew.rm("pkg") will uninstall pkg
• Homebrew.update() will update the available formulae for installation.
• Homebrew.list("pkg") will list all installed packaages and versions
• Homebrew.installed("pkg") will return a boolean denoting whether or not pkg is installed
• Homebrew.prefix() will return the prefix that all packages are installed to

As a package author, to use Homebrew.jl you use the Homebrew.HB provider and pass the formula name in via BinDeps' provides() function:

libffi = library_dependency("ffi", aliases = ["libffi"], runtime = false)

...

using Homebrew
provides( Homebrew.HB, "libffi", libffi, os = :Darwin )

Then, the Homebrew package will automatically download the requisite bottles for any dependencies you state it can provide.

We decided not to support this for two reasons:

Some of the formulae in the staticfloat/juliadeps tap are specifically patched to work with Julia. Some of these patches have not (or will not) be merged back into Homebrew mainline, so we don't want to conflict with any packages the user may or may not have installed.

The second reason is that we have modified Homebrew itself to support installation of Formulae without a compiler available on the user's machine.

Users can modify Homebrew's internal workings, so it's better to have a known good Homebrew fork than to risk bug reports from users that have unknowingly merged patches into Homebrew that break functionality we require

The biggest reason is the patches that have been applied to Homebrew itself. This package is pretty much meant to serve bottles only; you should never need to compile anything when using Homebrew.jl. This is on purpose, as there are many users who may wish to install packages for Julia, but don't have Xcode installed.

If you already have something installed, and it is usable, (e.g. BinDeps can load it and it passes any quick internal tests the Package authors have defined) then Homebrew.jl won't try to install it. BinDeps always checks to see if there is a library in the current load path that satisfies the requirements setup by package authors, and if there is, it doesn't build anything.