Keep Homebrew Formulae Up To Date

In the same vein as cleaning up my git branches, today I recalled that I can easily update my Homebrew formulae with the command brew upgrade.

This kicks off the process which may take a minute or two depending on how long it’s been since your last upgrade and how many formulae you have.

The upgrade process will:

1. Update Homebrew if it needs it.
2. Add new formulae
3. Delete formulae
4. Upgrade outdated packages
5. Run brew cleanup if it’s been 30+ days

$ brew upgrade
Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 2 taps (homebrew/core and homebrew/cask).
==> New Formulae
catch2 deno include-what-you-use pprint
clzip erlang@21 lizard spice-gtk
csvq heatshrink molten-vk spirv-tools
==> Updated Formulae
harfbuzz ✔ fluxctl mailutils raylib
imageoptim-cli ✔ fn mame re2
node ✔ fobis mat2 rebar3

While this is easy enough to do every few weeks (and I’ve set a reminder in my Things list, right next to sharpen my kitchen knives), my next challenge is to schedule it using a “chron job” — something I’ve never done before!

Also worth noting, if there’s a specific formula you want to upgrade, you can use brew upgrade <formula> (which you may notice is out of date by checking the version (brew <formula> -v).