Where can I find a list of all formulas available for homebrew?

Is there a way to get a list of all formulas (packages) I can install using homebrew for Mac OS X?

6 Answers

Online

You can visit formulae.brew.sh.

From your Mac

If you just want the package names for all formulae:

brew search 

The following command will list the info snippets for all existing Homebrew formulae:

brew info --all 

Or browse the local Git repository—thanks to Mk12 for that:

find /usr/local/Homebrew/ -type d -name "Formula" -exec ls -1 {} \; 

Apart from the things slhck mentioned, there's an online package browser available at formulae.brew.sh.

Technically, the answer provided by @pengii23 above is correct, but as we know, JSON isn't very easy to understand. Moreover, that results in over 266,000 lines of output for 4546 packages, or more than 56 lines per package.

What we really want is just the package name, and the package description. The format might be something like this:

package -- description goes here pack2 -- other description goes here 

Now, if you have done a brew install gron, then I have a doozy of a command-line for you that will generate the type of output above:

$ brew info --json=v1 --all | gron | egrep '(.desc|.full_name) =' | \ grep -v 'runtime_dependencies' | sed 's/full_name/_name/' | \ gron -u | egrep -v '({|}|\[|\])' | \ sed -e 's/^.*"_name": //' -e 's/^.*"desc": //' | tr -d '\n' | \ sed -e 's/""/^I/g' -e 's/","/ -- /g'| tr '\t' '\n' | tr -d '"' 

Note that you have to replace the literal "^I" in the line above with an actual tab character. For some reason, my sed is not liking '\t' instead of a literal tab character, and of course cutting-n-pasting a real tab character isn't going to work here.

Anyway, here's the first few lines of output from the command above:

a2ps -- Any-to-PostScript filter a52dec -- Library for decoding ATSC A/52 streams (AKA 'AC-3') aacgain -- AAC-supporting version of mp3gain aalib -- Portable ASCII art graphics library aamath -- Renders mathematical expressions as ASCII art aap -- Make-like tool to download, build, and install software aardvark_shell_utils -- Utilities to aid shell scripts or command-line users abcde -- Better CD Encoder abcl -- Armed Bear Common Lisp: a full implementation of Common Lisp abcm2ps -- ABC music notation software 

And here's the last few lines of output from the command above:

zssh -- Interactive file transfers over SSH zstd -- Zstandard is a real-time compression algorithm zsxd -- Zelda Mystery of Solarus XD zsync -- File transfer program zurl -- HTTP and WebSocket client worker with ZeroMQ interface zxcc -- CP/M 2/3 emulator for cross-compiling and CP/M tools under UNIX zxing-cpp -- C++ port of the ZXing barcode decoder zyre -- Local Area Clustering for Peer-to-Peer Applications zzuf -- Transparent application input fuzzer zzz -- Command-line tool to put Macs to sleep 

There you go! If you redirect that output to a file, you can then quickly grep the file for whatever kind of description you're looking for.

For example, if you're looking for compression commands, doing a brew search compress isn't very useful:

$ brew search compress ==> Searching local taps... htmlcompressor ncompress yuicompressor ==> Searching taps on GitHub... ==> Searching blacklisted, migrated and deleted formulae... 

But if we saved the output from the command above into a file in /tmp/brew.txt, then a simple grep compress /tmp/brew.txt returns 60 hits! Let's take a look at the first few:

$ grep -i compress /tmp/brew.txt | head advancecomp -- Recompression utilities for .PNG, .MNG, .ZIP, and .GZ files afsctool -- Utility for manipulating HFS+ compressed files aften -- Audio encoder which generates ATSC A/52 compressed audio streams archivemail -- Tool for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes brotli -- Generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm by Google bzip2 -- Freely available high-quality data compressor draco -- 3D geometric mesh and point cloud compression library ecm -- Prepare CD image files so they compress better epsilon -- Powerful wavelet image compressor exomizer -- 6502 compressor with CBM PET 4032 support 

So, if you were looking for advanced compression programs like brotli or zstd, but you didn't know the exact names to look for, then brew search compress would not be useful for you, but grepping through the output of the above command would return those two plus 58 more hits!

You're welcome! ;)

[ EDIT: Whoops! Sorry, I had forgotten to remove the runtime_dependencies from the previous version of the script. Sigh.... ]

You can list Homebrew formulae using the command

brew search 

or browse on the Web using .

UPDATE: Searching for casks has been integrated into the above-mentioned methods.

As of 3 April, 2021, use

brew info --all --json=v1 

To list all formulae in JSON format. To additionally also list casks, use:

brew info --all --json=v2 

Calling brew info --all without --json=vN throws an error.

grep desc $(brew --prefix)/Library/Formula/*.rb | perl -ne 'm{^.*/(.*?)\.rb.*?\"(.*)"$} and print "$1\t$2\n"'