Homebrew: list available versions with new formula@version format

Question

Homebrew recently deprecated homebrew/versions in favour of making versions available on homebrew/core via the new formula@version format. For example (as per this answer), you can do brew install postgresql@9.5.

Of course, this doesn't work for arbitrary versions. For instance, install cocoapods@1.1.1 turns up "Error: No formulae found in taps".

Under the old method, I could run brew versions <formula> to see available versions. How do I list available versions now?

score 149 · Accepted Answer · answered May 04 '17 at 18:12

149

You can search versions using brew search.

For example:

$ brew search postgresql
postgresql ✔      postgresql@9.4     postgresql@9.5

answered May 04 '17 at 18:12

Amelio Vazquez-Reina

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That's what I was afraid of... The program I need an old version for only has the current version available. Ah well. – Phlippie Bosman May 04 '17 at 18:45
2

This method is pretty useless for a package like `r`; it finds every package with an "r" in its name. – Ken Williams Dec 10 '20 at 18:07
How do I prevent `brew search` from including things like `github` when I search for `git`? – Aaron Franke Apr 01 '21 at 06:27

score 24 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 02 '20 at 20:41

This is an old question, but I found a "better" (for me) way to do this:

brew info --json PACKAGE_NAME | jq -r '.[].versioned_formulae[]'

For example, in the case of the package node, this will print:

$ brew info --json node | jq -r '.[].versioned_formulae[]'
node@10
node@12
node@8

You will need the program jq installed for it to drill down into the appropriate JSON, (brew install jq).

Since the above is gnarly to write/remember, I suggest setting up an alias or function in your favorite shell.

score 19 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 17 '18 at 05:02

And in case you wanted to just look up the specific version used by a formula after finding it using search, you can get the info with:

brew info <formula>
# or for a cask:
brew cask info <formula>

e.g. brew info postgresql@10, or brew cask info vlc

And if you can't find a popular old version of a cask, you may be able to get it via homebrew-cask-versions, which is installable with brew tap homebrew/cask-versions.

Homebrew: list available versions with new formula@version format

3 Answers3