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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Cask?
A Cask is like a Formula in Homebrew except it describes how to download
and install a binary application.
Casks currently have three fields:
- url: (required) points to binary distribution of the application
- version: (required) describes the version of the application available at the URL
- homepage: the same as Homebrew's - it doesn't do anything yet, but will be wired in
What's the status of this project? Where's it headed?
brew-cask currently understands how to install dmg and zip files that
contain a .app file. I'd like to extend it to be able to handle pkg files
as well as the numerous other permutations of compression and distribution in
the wild (.app inside dmg inside zip; folder inside dmg; etc.).
The idea is for each Cask to encapsulate and automate the story of how a given application should be installed. Join us in building up a community-maintained collection of Casks that is striving to become the standard way that hackers install Mac apps.
Can I contribute?
Yes, yes, yes! Please fork/pull request to update Casks, to add features, to clean up documentation—anything at all that you can do to help out is very welcome.
It's also pretty darn easy to create Casks (see CONTRIBUTING.md), so
please build more of them for the software you use. And if brew-cask doesn't
support the packaging format of your software, please open an issue
and we can get it working together.
The whole idea is to build a community-maintained list of easily installable packages, so the community part is important! Every little bit counts.
Why use Homebrew's Cellar? Why not just manage apps directly in Applications?
The short answer to this would be: for the same reason that Homebrew does not install applications directly into /usr/local.
We don't know up-front precisely what files are going to be in the dmg/zip/tgz/etc, so it's really helpful to have a place to dump all of them safely then iterate through and act on the files we care about. For a .app file this may be symlinking it into ~/Applications or /Applications, for a .pkg file this might be running the installer. For a screensaver it may be symlinking it into the appropriate directory for it to show up in System Preferences.
The reason we implement this project on top of Homebrew was based on a belief that their methodology for managing applications has a lot of merit. We'd prefer to try and work things so that we can keep ourselves Homebrewy both in implementation and idioms. Trying to manage all of ~/Applications would move the project more towards a standalone system, which would mean reimplementing a lot of the Homebrew stuff we lean on now.