How can I run two isolated installations of Homebrew?

Question

I want to install and run two versions of Homebrew simultaneously on an Apple Silicon Mac: an ARM64 version, and an Intel version running under Rosetta 2.

I know I can prepend any brew command with arch --x86_64 to emulate Intel for that command, but this can lead to conflicts for formulas whose dependencies you already have built for ARM64. For example:

Error: gnupg dependencies not built for the x86_64 CPU architecture:
  pkg-config was built for arm64
  gettext was built for arm64
  readline was built for arm64
  openssl@1.1 was built for arm64

How can I install and run two separate, isolated versions of Homebrew (one for native ARM64 and one for emulated Intel), keeping each of their installed formulae and dependencies separate?

Answer 1

1. Install Homebrew natively on Apple Silicon in /opt/homebrew:

   mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew
   

2. Install Intel-emulated Homebrew to the default /usr/local:

   arch --x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
   

   If you haven't yet installed Rosetta 2, you'll need to run softwareupdate --install-rosetta first.

3. Create an alias for Intel homebrew. I'm calling mine brow because O for old. But hey you do your own thing.

   In ~/.zshrc (or your shell's equivalent) add:

   alias brow='arch --x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew'
   

4. Add ARM Homebrew to your PATH.

   In ~/.zshrc (or your shell's equivalent) add:

   # Homebrew on Apple Silicon
   path=('/opt/homebrew/bin' $path)
   export PATH
   

   If you're still on bash it'd be PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH

5. Confirm

   which brew should return /opt/homebrew/bin/brew

   brew --prefix should return /opt/homebrew

   which brow should return brow: aliased to arch --x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew

   brow --prefix should return /usr/local

---

If you have the same command installed in both Homebrews, it'll default to Apple Silicon (/opt/homebrew/) since we prepended that one in our PATH. To override, run the command with its full path (/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl), or override your PATH for one command (PATH=/usr/local/bin youtube-dl).

I also created another handy alias in .zshrc (alias ib='PATH=/usr/local/bin') so I can prepend any Homebrew-installed command with ib to force using the Intel version of that command:

~ ▶ which youtube-dl
/opt/homebrew/bin/youtube-dl
~ ▶ ib which youtube-dl
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

If you prefer Intel to be the default brew, add /opt/homebrew/bin to the end of your PATH instead of the beginning.