How to update a command-line program using Homebrew

homebrew

curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URLs. It is installed on my system as version 7.51.0. According to the tool's homepage, its current version number is 7.54.0. I'd like to update my copy of this tool to the latest version.

According to the Releases and Downloads page of curl's website, the latest version can be installed on Mac OS X using Homebrew.

How can I use Homebrew to update my copy of curl to the latest version? Is updating the same as installing? If so, then the answer to my question is:

> brew install curl

But is there a different way to update an already existing program?

Best Answer

Simply no. Only Apple can update programs in /usr/bin etc.

However you can make your scripts find the program from Homebrew first. You do this by making your $PATH have /usr/local/bin (which is where Homebrew puts links to the executables) earlier in the $PATH than OS supplied programs.

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How to integrate Homebrew with non-managed software in /usr/local

I use 1.

I just compile my software using /usr/local as the prefix and I'm done. I had no problem so far. I don't know whether I'll experience problems, but I started ~1y ago and so far so good.

However…

If I'd have to start again today, I'd follow 2 (which I didn't know at the time). That way it's easy enough to know where everything is and what, exactly, the software has installed (since the hierarchy for /usr/local/Cellar/foo/1.0 is something like

bin/      etc/      include/  lib/      share/

)

3 doesn't seem worth.

How to work around a “Could not resolve host: (nil)…” error when installing/using Homebrew

Seems that you have problems connecting to github via https.

While I'm not sure what could cause it and how to fix it, you still can use git with another protocol.

Here's the commands to install homebrew in /usr/local/ from scratch using git:// instead of https://:

cd /usr/local/
git init -q
git remote add origin git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
git fetch origin master:refs/remotes/origin/master -n
git reset --hard origin/master

That should work. Please notice that if you choose to use another directory for homebrew, you probably will have to append its ./bin directory to your environment PATH variable for comfortable usage.

Best Answer

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How to integrate Homebrew with non-managed software in /usr/local

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