I already love homebrew. From the beautiful interface to the checks it puts in place to keep me from doing something stupid, homebrew is great (that being said, I could do with shorter update times and less breaking but updating is done with git and building a package manager is hard).

Today, though, I learned about just one more reason why homebrew is great. If you have ever wondered how homebrew seems to have an endless supply of packages (until it doesn’t) this is thanks to great tooling. The work flow for adding a new formula to homebrew is really good so right now I’ll walk you through how its done by making a formula for Paul Batchelor’s soundpipe library. This library is a requirement for a different program I want to install (sporth) so I may update this post in the future with information on how to create that formula as well.

Full disclosure, at the time of writing, this formula has not yet been merged into the homebrew package repo so I may have to change it a bit to be completely compliant with their standards.

To begin, most important information regarding writing formulas can be found here and if you would rather go to the source as opposed to seeing a walkthrough go there now.

The workflow of creating a new homebrew formula starts appropriatly with the brew create url command. Where url points to the tarball of the project’s source. Assuming the project is on github, this url is of the form https://github.com/:user:/:repo:/archive/:tag:.tar.gz. This url points to a tarball of the repo’s source at the specified tag. For soundpipe this turns out to be:

brew create "https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/soundpipe/archive/v1.7.0.tar.gz"

This will download the tarball for the cache and open up $EDITOR with the formula’s ruby file loaded. At this point you should read and then delete all of the auto generated comments (brew will not let you merge if you do not do this). Make sure all of the auto filled fields are correct and if they aren’t fix them. The description can neither start with an indefinite article nor end with a period, so fix that if it does. Also if the project has any dependencies, first make sure they can be installed through homebrew and then list them by inserting a new line after the sha256 field and then adding depends_on "dependency" Soundpipe’s readme tells us that it depends on libsndfile.

Now it’s time to actually build the thing! Start by running

brew install soundpipe --interactive

This will put you into a temporary directory with the decompressed source. Brew provides you with many useful env variables and to see them all just run env | grep HOMEBREW. The most important one that we’ll be using is $HOMEBREW_FORMULA_PREFIX. This points to the location where the package should be installed. At this point, read the repo’s README and figure out how to install the package. For soundpipe this comes down to a basic

make 
make install

However, make install does not use the correct prefix so we’ll have to set it ourselves by running make install PREFIX=$HOMEBREW_FORMULA_PREFIX instead. Because soundpipe comes with tests and examples, you should copy them over to the $HOMEBREW_FORMULA_PREFIX/soundpipe/share as well.

Once you have figured out how to install the package and actually done it once convert the steps you ran manually into ruby using the system function to run shell commands and ruby’s builtin commands over shell commands if possible. For soundpipe this is

def install
  system "make"
  mkdir_p pkgshare #tests and examples should be installed to pkgshare
  cp_r "test", pkgshare
  cp_r "examples", pkgshare
  system "make", "install", "PREFIX=#{prefix}"
end

the prefix variable will be set to the same thing as $HOMEBREW_FORMULA_PREFIX.

Next, set up the tests. To test the install we’ll compile one of the examples and make sure that it’s output is correct. I chose examples/ex_osc.c because it is very simple.

test do
  system ENV.cc, "#{pkgshare}/examples/ex_osc.c", "-o#{testpath}/test",
        "-L#{lib}", "-L#{HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/lib", "-lsndfile", "-lsoundpipe"
  system "cd #{testpath};./test"
  hash = "07caba5db440b7442fbe8d40145e0dbc06ef52c0088380e581c6071a05c94bc6"
  #make sure to `require "digest"` at the top of the file
  assert_equal hash, Digest::SHA256.file("#{testpath}/test.wav").hexdigest
end

Finally run

brew reinstall soundpipe
brew test soundpipe
brew audit --strict soundpipe
brew audit --new-formula --online soundpipe

Assuming everything went alright you are good to issue a pull request and try to get your new formula added. If either of the audit commands issued suggestions, fix them before you move on.

To issue a pull request, first make sure you have forked https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/28089. The run cd $(brew --repo homebrew/core) to go to the git repo with all the formulas. From here run

git checkout -b soundpipe 
git add Formula/soundpipe.rb
git commit

Follow these rules for formatting your commit message:

The established standard for Git commit messages is:

the first line is a commit summary of 50 characters or less
two (2) newlines, then
explain the commit thoroughly
At Homebrew, we like to put the name of the formula up front like so: foobar 7.3
(new formula). This may seem crazy short, but you’ll find that forcing yourself
to summarise the commit encourages you to be atomic and concise. If you can’t
summarise it in 50-80 characters, you’re probably trying to commit two commits
as one.

Now run

git push https://github.com/username/homebrew-core/ soundpipe

and open a pull request!

Here’s a link to the complete formula.

That should be it. After this, all you need to do is wait for your pull request to be merged and watch for any comments or suggestions on the thread!

The entire workflow comes down to creating the template formula, installing and testing the package manually then converting that into ruby. You don’t have to write any boiler plate whatsoever! Tooling like this is so important to maintaining a healthy ecosystem around a project, especially something as ambitious as a package manager.