How do I find a list of Homebrew's installable packages?
ListMacosInstallationPackageHomebrewList Problem Overview
Recently I installed Brew. How can I retrieve a list of available brew packages to install?
List Solutions
Solution 1 - List
brew help
will show you the list of commands that are available.
brew list
will show you the list of installed packages. You can also append formulae, for example brew list postgres
will tell you of files installed by postgres (providing it is indeed installed).
brew search <search term>
will list the possible packages that you can install. brew search post
will return multiple packages that are available to install that have post in their name.
brew info <package name>
will display some basic information about the package in question.
Solution 2 - List
From the man page:
> search, -S text|/text/ > Perform a substring search of formula names for text. If text is surrounded with slashes, > then it is interpreted as a regular expression. If no search term is given, > all available formula are displayed.
For your purposes, brew search
will suffice.
Solution 3 - List
Since Homebrew 2.6.0 released in 2020.12.01, brew list
behaves a little differently. This is one of the reason I post the following answer.
Installed Packages
Homebrew describes packages as formulae. There's another kind of package know as cask, which is used for GUI apps installed by brew install --cask
.
Formerly, brew list
will only list installed formulae. After 2.6.0, brew list
will list both of packages and casks. You may wanna check them separately
brew list --formula
brew list --cask
Available Packages
List
brew formulae
, list all available formulaebrew casks
, list all casks (These two commands are fast cause it's implemented in Bash not Ruby)
Search
# search local installed
brew search --formula keyword
brew serach --cask keyword
# search online available
brew search --formulae keyword
brew serach --casks keyword
Solution 4 - List
Please use Homebrew Formulae page to see the list of installable packages. <https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/>
To install any package => command to use is :
brew install node