Building a Homebrew tap to distribute my software
TL;DR: I built a Homebrew tap so you can install my fonts and CLI tools with a single
brew install: https://github.com/nanxstats/homebrew-tap
Photo by Clay Banks.
Until this week, I distributed my software the artisanal way: command line tools on PyPI and crates.io, fonts as zip files attached to GitHub releases. This works, but it asks every user to know a different “incantation” for each thing.
Now, Homebrew can handle all of it. For example:
brew install nanxstats/tap/asciilint
brew install nanxstats/tap/bisectrunk
brew install nanxstats/tap/pkglite
brew install --cask nanxstats/tap/font-anthrosevka-mono
brew install --cask nanxstats/tap/font-dm-mono-ligaturized
brew install --cask nanxstats/tap/font-paper-mono-ligaturizedThe fully qualified names add the tap automatically on first use, so no setup needed.
Why
The immediate reason is my friend Simo, who is setting up his homelab. He has written Ansible playbooks that configure his Linux servers, macOS dev machines, and cloud instances for language model training and inference. A few weeks ago he asked if my custom, ligaturized coding fonts could be made installable via Homebrew, so his playbooks could use a simple API instead of scripting the installations in-house. I have to admit it’s a convincing argument and it’s hard to say no to someone who has automated everything else.
My own software packaging experience was limited to publishing to the Arch User Repository (AUR) about 15 years ago, and even that was mostly copying a text file from a template. Back then, I was a young, naive student who picked Arch as the daily driver for a ThinkPad T60, which meant regular quality time with GRUB, the kernel, and AMD graphics drivers. ANYWAYS, having been away that long, I was a little surprised to learn that Homebrew now runs on Linux too, which is exactly what makes it work for Simo, since one interface covers his entire development infra.
Besides the fonts, adding my CLI tools is obviously needed.
I have written a few in Python and
Rust over the past year. With Homebrew,
you can skip pipx install or cargo install and let one package
manager own everything at the system level.
The tap
Homebrew’s main repository has some notability requirements that my repos fail, so I created my own tap.
A tap is a GitHub repo with a specific layout that brew knows how to install from.
Each software is a declarative Ruby file.
For a smooth start, the tap currently ships 4 formulae: asciilint and py-pkglite (Python, each installed into its own isolated virtual environment), bisectrunk and revdeprun (Rust, compiled from source), plus 7 font casks.
The Homebrew developer experience
The user half of Homebrew is lovely: once the tap exists, installation just works. The developer half took more effort than I expected. I suspect I had actually attempted this before, because I have a distinct memory of bouncing off the Homebrew documentation. It was written in a quite verbose style, and I still kept getting lost about which part applied to my situation. I’m sure it’s my fault for being a rookie… Overall, I would not bet on a first-time tap author getting a formula right on the first try, and probably nobody is falling into the pit of success here.
In practice, the tricky part was the loop, that is, figuring out how a
formula or cask should be written, then figuring out which brew commands
would tell me whether I wrote it correctly (never mind whether it worked).
It even took today’s frontier AI agents several tries to get things
right, which I found oddly comforting as a human.
The positive aspect is that the Homebrew toolchain validates a lot of things
behind the scenes: between brew style, brew audit --strict, brew test,
and the test bot running CI on macOS and Linux. By the time everything passes,
you can be reasonably confident the tap is in good shape, at least on paper.
If you use any of my fonts or tools, give the tap a try, and please create an issue if anything breaks. And thanks, Simo, for the nudge!