any-tap.rb: brew tap for everything!

NOTICE 2014-05-06

Homebrew recently changed how it structures Library/Taps. As a result, you may have seen warnings when updating brew. The warning can sound scary, but the good news is that the fix is pretty simple. For details, please see my comment here on a related issue.

What is brew anytap?

It's an external command for Homebrew. It is meant to be a replacement for the built-in brew tap command. That command has certain limitations, but because of backwards compatibility, it's hard to update.

This command scratches my itch. I wanted a souped-up version of brew tap. I have freely borrowed (ahem, stolen) code from the existing brew tap command. I thank all the people who worked on that.

Installation

• The easiest thing is (ironically?) to use brew tap:

    brew tap telemachus/anytap
    brew install brew-any-tap
  

  That will install brew any-tap and brew any-untap. See below for usage notes on both.

• If you prefer, however, you can simply clone this repository and then copy brew-any-tap.rb and brew-any-untap.rb anywhere in your $PATH.

  If you do that, brew will automatically be able to pick up the commands and do the right thing with them.

Usage

• brew any-tap

  • brew any-tap: List currently installed taps
  • brew any-tap -h|-?|--help: Get usage
  • brew any-tap -r|--repair: Check all symlinks and remove orphans
  • brew any-tap user name URL: Clone repo at URL as 'user/{homebrew-}name' The prefix 'homebrew-' will be added if not given in order to conform with what other brew commands expect.

• brew any-untap

  • brew any-untap -h|-?|--help: Get usage
  • brew any-untap: List currently installed taps
  • brew any-untap name1 [name2 name3 ...]: Untap one or more taps

• The key difference between brew tap and brew any-tap is that brew any-tap will attempt to tap any URL that you give it. You can tap private repositories, things not on GitHub, things on disc rather than online anywhere, and things that have any naming conventions.

  The price you pay is that you must be more explicit because brew any-tap and brew any-untap don't make any assumptions. To tap a new repository using brew any-tap requires three arguments. The first two are combined to create the directory structure that brew expects (more on this below), and the last is the URL of repo that you want to clone. brew any-tap will combine the first two arguments and check if there's a directory at HOMEBREW_LIBRARY/"Taps/#{arg1}/homebrew-#{arg2}". If such a directory already exists, the tap aborts. Otherwise, brew any-tap combines the arguments to run the following command:

    git clone arg3 HOMEBREW_LIBRARY/"Taps/#{arg1}/homebrew-#{arg2}"
  

  To make this a bit more concrete, here's a call and what it would do:

    brew any-tap telemachus myjunk https://[email protected]/telemachus/brew.git
    -- Assuming it doesn't yet exist
    git clone https://[email protected]/telemachus/brew.git HOMEBREW_LIBRARY/Taps/telemachus/homebrew-myjunk
  

  You might wonder why 'homebrew-' is added to the second argument. Unfortunately, other brew commands---in particular brew install---assume that all taps have 'homebrew-' in their name. In order to work smoothly with brew as a whole, brew any-tap will add 'homebrew-' to arg2 if it's not already there.

Historical note

When brew tap was first created, all taps were added directly below the Taps directory, but after a recent change, they are now added to subdirectories, according to the username of the repo owner on GitHub. That is, all new taps exist at Taps/username/homebrew-reponame. As of version 0.0.9, brew any-tap uses this same structure in order to be fully compatible with the rest of brew.

Contributors

• ipmcc
• Ivan Andrus
• Mike English

Contributing

Fork, edit and pass me a pull request. Nothing more formal than that, but please do let me know why the change makes sense. Thanks.