Over the weekend, I finally upgraded my system to Mac OS Lion. I also took the opportunity to do a completely fresh install of my system, doing a final TimeMachine backup before erasing the hard drive and then installing Lion off a USB thumb drive.
I have long used MacPorts as my open source package manager, but I’ve had issues recently with certain ports not being updated or being out of date. So I was really interested in Homebrew. The fact that it is all on github, open and actively developed really appealed to me. After getting it up and running, I wanted to port my package update notifier to use Homebrew. Doing so was really quite easy. Here’s what I came up with, which is also in my dotfiles on github.
#!/bin/bash # # Notify of Homebrew updates via Growl on Mac OS X # # Author: Chris Streeter http://www.chrisstreeter.com # Requires: Growl Notify Extra to be installed. Install with # brew install growlnotify TERM_APP='/Applications/Terminal.app' BREW_EXEC='/usr/local/bin/brew' GROWL_NOTIFY='/usr/local/bin/growlnotify' GROWL_TITLE="Homebrew Update(s) Available" GROWL_ARGS="-n 'Homebrew' -d $GROWL_NOTIFY -a $BREW_EXEC" $BREW_EXEC update 2>&1 > /dev/null outdated=`$BREW_EXEC outdated | tr ' ' '\n'` if [ -z "$outdated" ] ; then if [ -e $GROWL_NOTIFY ]; then # No updates available $GROWL_NOTIFY $GROWL_ARGS -m '' -t "No Homebrew Updates Available" fi else # We've got an outdated formula or two # Nofity via growl if [ -e $GROWL_NOTIFY ]; then lc=$((`echo "$outdated" | wc -l`)) outdated=`echo "$outdated" | tail -$lc` message=`echo "$outdated" | head -5` if [ "$outdated" != "$message" ]; then message="Some of the outdated formulae are: $message" else message="The following formulae are outdated: $message" fi # Send to growlnotify echo "$message" | $GROWL_NOTIFY $GROWL_ARGS -s -t $GROWL_TITLE fi fi
Assuming the script is at ~/bin/brew-update-notifier, you can install the script to a crontab by running sudo crontab -e, then adding the line 0 12 * * * /Users/<username>/bin/brew-update-notifier to the end of the file (substituting <username> for your username, or wherever you’ve put the script). I’ve chosen to run the script every day at noon because my computer is likely to be on and connected to a network.