FAQ.md

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. To learn how to write a Cask, see CONTRIBUTING.md. For a complete reference, see CASK_LANGUAGE_REFERENCE.md.

What's the status of this project? Where's it headed?

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, add features and clean up documentation! Anything you can do to help out is very welcome.

It's also pretty darn easy to create Casks, so please build more of them for the software you use. And if homebrew-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 an .app file this may be symlinking it into ~/Applications or /Applications, for a .pkg file this might be running the installer. For a Screen Saver 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.

Can I set up my own Cask Tap?

Yes! See ALTERNATE_CASK_TAPS.md.

Can I install a version other than the English one?

Some applications such as Thunderbird or Firefox provides many localized versions. However, currently only English versions are provided in the main repository. Additional languages may be available in the [https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-versions](homebrew-version repository). We are aiming to find a better system to manage multiple languages and versions.

How about applications that auto-update but that are managed by Cask?

Applications that auto-update such as Firefox, Thunderbird or VLC will do so as usual, nothing will be broken. A minor issue however is that the application will still be located in a versioned folder even though the version has changed. For example, the application might be installed in /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/mygreatapp/1.3 even though the version number is now 1.4.

Is this the same project I used to Tap at phinze/homebrew-cask ?

Yes. The original repo at https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask has moved under the organizational umbrella at https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask .

Web redirection happens automatically.

The location of the Homebrew-cask Tap on disk has also changed. If you have a very old installation, you may need to run:

$ brew untap phinze/cask; brew tap caskroom/cask

brew cask list shows that a package is installed, but when I try to do brew cask uninstall, it tells me that the package is not installed. Help!

This is a problem with the bookkeeping in the current implementation of Cask, which gets confused if a cask is updated after installation. For now, use the brew cask uninstall --force to uninstall these packages.

This issue is currently being addressed here and here.