Homebrew in your menu bar.
A free, open-source Homebrew GUI for macOS. Browse, install, update and remove your Mac apps and tools without opening the Terminal.
Install · Features · Keyboard · Privacy · FAQ · Build · Website
brew tap RossNicholson/tap
brew trust --cask rossnicholson/tap/brewdock
brew install --cask brewdockHomebrew 7 asks you to trust casks from other taps before installing them. On older versions of Homebrew, skip the brew trust line.
Then click the mug in your menu bar, or press ⌥⌘B from any app.
Requirements: macOS 13 Ventura or later · Homebrew · Apple Silicon or Intel
BrewDock checks for new versions of itself. Open Settings → Check for updates → Update BrewDock, and it quits, updates and reopens on its own. You can also run brew upgrade --cask brewdock in Terminal.
On BrewDock 1.2 or earlier with Homebrew 7? If Update BrewDock fails, update once from Terminal. 1.3 and later handle this themselves:
brew upgrade --cask rossnicholson/tap/brewdock
- Apps: every Homebrew cask, with its real icon. Click to open; hover or right-click to update, show in Finder or uninstall.
- Tools: the formulae you installed come first. Dependencies Homebrew added for you are folded away below. Click a tool to open it in Terminal or iTerm2.
- Services: start, stop and restart Homebrew services like PostgreSQL and Redis.
- Background checks: BrewDock refreshes Homebrew's package list every few hours. An orange dot on the menu bar icon means updates are waiting.
- Update alerts: optional notifications when new versions come out. Each update is announced once.
- Update all, or one at a time, with live progress ("Downloading…", "Unpacking…") instead of a bare spinner.
- Auto-update: off by default. Turn it on in Settings and BrewDock updates all your apps and tools every 10 minutes. Apps that are open wait until you quit them, and held packages are skipped.
- Don't update: right-click to hold a package at its current version. Tools use
brew pin, so Terminal'sbrew upgraderespects it too. - Self-updating apps: optionally include apps like Chrome and Slack, which Homebrew normally leaves out of updates.
- 230+ hand-picked apps and tools in 10 categories: browsers, development, AI, databases, DevOps, design, productivity, communication, security and utilities.
- Search all of Homebrew: type two or more letters and BrewDock also searches Homebrew's full catalogue.
- One-click install, with live progress.
- From the maker of BrewDock: Mop Up (a free Mac cleaner) and ClawdBar (Claude Code usage in the menu bar) are listed first.
- Brewfile: back up your setup, restore it on a new Mac, see what's missing, or remove anything not in the file.
- Free up space: see how much room old versions and cached downloads take, and clear them in one click.
- Homebrew 7 trusted taps: if Homebrew refuses a package from a tap you haven't trusted, BrewDock tells you which one, and asks before trusting it.
100% SwiftUI, with no Electron. It has light and dark mode, VoiceOver support, and a small mug who waves hello. Want more room? Drag the grip in the panel's bottom-right corner to make it bigger; BrewDock remembers the size.
 Tools |
 Services |
 Discover |
 Settings |
 Brewfile |
 Dark mode |
| Keys | What it does |
|---|---|
| ⌥⌘B | Open BrewDock from any app, with the cursor in search (turn off in Settings) |
| Esc | Close the panel |
| Right-click a row | Open, Update, Show in Finder, Don't update, Uninstall… |
BrewDock collects nothing: no analytics, no accounts, no tracking. It runs the brew command on your Mac, and Homebrew does the downloading. The icons in Discover ship with the app, so browsing it makes no network requests.
Is BrewDock a Cakebrew alternative? Yes. Like Cakebrew, it's a free Homebrew GUI for the Mac. BrewDock lives in the menu bar rather than a window, and it also manages casks, Homebrew services, Brewfiles and Homebrew 7's trusted taps.
Homebrew says it's "refusing to load" a cask from an untrusted tap. Homebrew 7 needs you to trust casks from taps other than its own. BrewDock shows a Trust needed banner naming the cask and its tap. Click Trust to allow it, and BrewDock retries whatever was refused.
Chrome, Slack or Zoom never show an update. Those apps update themselves, so Homebrew skips them by default. Turn on Settings → Self-updating apps to include them.
Can BrewDock keep everything updated automatically?
Yes. Turn on Settings → Auto-update (it's off by default) and BrewDock runs brew update and upgrades all your apps and tools every 10 minutes. Apps that are open are updated once you quit them, and anything set to Don't update is left alone.
An update or install failed.
The message at the bottom of the panel includes Homebrew's reason. If BrewDock's own update fails, its log is at ~/Library/Application Support/BrewDock/brewdock-self-upgrade.log.
How do I uninstall BrewDock?
Right-click it in the Apps tab, or run brew uninstall --cask brewdock. Add --zap to remove its settings too.
brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/RossNicholson/brewdock.git
cd brewdock
xcodegen generate
open BrewDock.xcodeproj # then press ⌘RThe .xcodeproj is generated from project.yml, so re-run xcodegen generate after editing that file or adding files.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
make test |
Run the unit tests |
make check-catalog |
Check the Discover catalog against Homebrew for renamed or retired packages (also runs weekly in CI) |
make discover-icons |
Download icons for new Discover entries into the app (it ships them, so Discover needs no network) |
make screenshots |
Render the panel and popovers with sample packages into build/screenshots |
make release VERSION=x.y.z |
Ship a release; see RELEASING.md |
Bug reports, feature ideas and pull requests are welcome. Open an issue to start.
BrewDock is made by Ross Nicholson. For help, see the support page or email support@rossnicholson.dev.
If BrewDock saves you time, you can buy me a coffee ☕
GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.
The look and the menu bar panel come from HouseStyle (MIT), shared with my other Mac apps, ClawdBar and Mop Up. Its bundled fonts, Barlow Condensed and Geist Mono, are under the SIL Open Font License. Homebrew is a separate project and isn't affiliated with BrewDock.