How to Create and Maintain a Tap
Taps are external sources of Homebrew formulae and/or external commands. They can be created by anyone to provide their own formulae and/or external commands to any Homebrew user.
Creating a tap
A tap is usually a Git repository available online, but you can use anything as
long as it’s a protocol that Git understands, or even just a directory with
files in it.
If hosted on GitHub, we recommend that the repository’s name start with
homebrew-.
Tap formulae follow the same format as the core’s ones, and can be added at the
repository’s root, or under Formula or HomebrewFormula subdirectories. We
recommend the latter options because it makes the repository organisation
easier to grasp, and top-level files are not mixed with formulae.
See homebrew/php for an example of
a tap with a Formula subdirectory.
Installing
If it’s on GitHub, users can install any of your formulae with
brew install user/repo/formula. Homebrew will automatically add your
github.com/user/homebrew-repo tap before installing the formula.
user/repo/formula points to the github.com/user/homebrew-repo/**/formula.rb
file here.
If they want to get your tap without installing any formula at the same time,
users can add it with the brew tap command.
If it’s on GitHub, they can use brew tap user/repo, where user is your
GitHub username and homebrew-repo your repository.
If it’s hosted outside of GitHub, they have to use brew tap user/repo <URL>,
where user and repo will be used to refer to your tap and <URL> is your
Git clone URL.
Users can then install your formulae either with brew install foo if there’s
no core formula with the same name, or with brew install user/repo/foo to
avoid conflicts.
Maintaining a tap
A tap is just a Git repository so you don’t have to do anything specific when making modifications, apart from committing and pushing your changes.
Updating
Once your tap is installed, Homebrew will update it each time a user runs
brew update. Outdated formulae will be upgraded when a user runs
brew upgrade, like core formulae.
External commands
You can provide your tap users with custom brew commands by adding them in a
cmd subdirectory. Read more on external commands.
See homebrew/aliases for an example of a tap with external commands.
