How do I tell Homebrew to stop running brew update every time I want to install something?

Question

Homebrew started running brew update automatically before every brew install. This means that I need to wait 10-20 seconds, depending on network speed, every time I want to install a package. This is tedious and unnecessary.

How can I opt out from this behavior, or set it to something saner?

Solution 1

Just prefix your install command with HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1, like this:

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install somepackage

Source: brew manpage

Solution 2

I just modified /usr/local/bin/brew to add HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 (according to @D Schlachter answer) at the start of the file

Solution 3

I personally find pinning/unpinning formulas more useful. For example you install a tool depends on 100 libraries which you don't use.

brew deps someprogram | xargs brew pin

Then you can check your pinned formulas anytime. If you have any problems with the version just unpin.

Not recommended to everyone, to pin all the formulas and manage updates manually:

brew list | xargs brew pin

Solution 4

To have brew automatically run brew update AFTER installing, I added the following to my bash/zsh environment:

function brew2() {
    HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew "$@" && brew update
}

Then to install package x, I do brew2 x, for example brew2 cask install spotmenu. Seems to work.

View more solutions

Comments

[cpcallen]

Why not just add export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 to your .bashrc?

[Rob]

this and/or @cpcallen's comment above should be marked as the correct answer.

[philraj]

What does this have to do with homebrew updating itself?

[Dominik Szymański]

Why want homebrew to update everything before or after install at all? "If something is working, don't fix it", yet brew is doing it. Why would it be updating mitmproxy when I only want to install mysql-client?

[Simon Alford]

The best thing to do, imo, would be to auto-update everything in the background, the way apps autoupdate on phones nowadays. Something like this: apple.stackexchange.com/a/206474/308005

[applecrusher]

Why is this not the default setting? Who says, let me install something and while I am at it upgrade the other 50 things (because that certainly won't break anything)