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Derek Hopper
Derek Hopper

Posted on • Edited on

What tips do you have for homebrew users?

#discuss

This morning, I recovered 110 GB of disk space thanks to one command.

I'm a heavy homebrew user. I install packages all the time. On top of that, I brew update and brew upgrade quite often. I like to stay up to date.

Over the years, I continued to install packages, update, and upgrade them. All the while I was ignoring one important command.

My Story

This morning, I was greeted with this alert. Hmmmm... I thought. What could this be?

The Low Disk Space Alert

My documents folder had a few gigabytes of data, but that wasn't filling up my entire disk. That's when I started exploring homebrew packages. I realized I had been keeping many, many old homebrew packages around for no reason.

The Command

That's when I ran the command brew cleanup. Oh boy, I was in for a surprise. My terminal started spitting out line after line of this:

brew cleanup log

That's a lot of disk space!

After that completed (which took about 15 minutes), I suddenly had 120 GB of free space to work with. And that got me thinking, what else do I not know about homebrew? Do you have any tips for us homebrew users out there?

Top comments (3)

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clpsplug profile image
C. Plug •

There's an argument switch to have homebrew do clean-up every time it upgrades!

brew upgrade --cleanup

==> Upgrading tbb
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/tbb-2019_U2.mojave.bottle.t
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring tbb-2019_U2.mojave.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/tbb/2019_U2: 134 files, 2.7MB
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/tbb/2019_U1... (134 files, 2.7MB)
Removing: /Users/me XD/Library/Caches/Homebrew/tbb--2019_U1.mojave.bottle.tar.gz... (660.2KB)
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rhymes profile image
rhymes •

Ah ah the magic cleanup!

I created an alias so I won't forget:

> alias brew-upgrade
brew-upgrade='brew update && brew upgrade && brew cask upgrade && brew cleanup'
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aikedejongste profile image
Aike de Jongste •

==> This operation has freed approximately 417.6MB of disk space.

My tip would be to use a Brewfile: robots.thoughtbot.com/brewfile-a-g...

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