homebrew and all the updates

I wanted to quickly brew install something last week and was a bit frustrated when it took so long. It should really have taken a few seconds but it took closer to 5 minutes.

Why? Because brew, having been awoken from a lengthy slumber, wanted to update all the things.

I get it brew but do this some other time.

So, like any rational person, I complained on Twitter and got two super helpful responses that will hopefully make my life (and yours) easier.

First from Hrishi:

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

why this is not the default remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe

— Hrishi Mittal (@hrishio) November 24, 2023

Genuis! Don’t do that auto-updating brew.

But, then when does brew do it’s updating?

Well, Jacob fixes that by having a daily job to run brew update:

I have a script I run daily to update brew, and packages in my brewfile exactly to avoid this problem 😅

— Jacob Stordahl (@stordahldotdev) November 25, 2023

With these two excellent pieces of advice, I will be less frustrated by brew the next time I want to use it to install a new package.