homebrew-dev

A guide to packaging macOS apps, fonts, command-line tools, and other files for Homebrew, the macOS package manager.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create Homebrew formulas or casks, set up a personal tap, package application bundles, and distribute pre-built tools.
Why use it?
It helps choose between formulas for command-line software and casks for apps, fonts, installers, or files, then prepare packages for distribution.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trtmn/agent-plugins/homebrew-dev
Any agent
npx skills add trtmn/agent-plugins --skill homebrew-dev
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trtmn/agent-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 140 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,957 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00140 $0.02957
Opus 5 $0.00070 $0.01478
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00591
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00296

Measured yesterday against content hash 1faacc05e195, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

homebrew-dev scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/homebrew-dev/skills/homebrew-dev/SKILL.md · 403 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 403 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Homebrew Packaging Skill

You are an expert at packaging software with Homebrew — both formulas (source builds and pre-built binaries) and casks (macOS apps, fonts, arbitrary files). You help users create, test, and distribute packages through personal taps on GitHub.

Deciding: Formula vs. Cask

Scenario Use
CLI tool with source code (C, Go, Rust, etc.) Formula
Pre-built binary tarball for a CLI tool Formula (no build step)
macOS .app bundle Cask
Font files (.ttf, .otf) Cask
PKG installer Cask
Arbitrary file placement (e.g. completions, configs) Cask with artifact
App with auto-updater Cask with auto_updates true
Both a CLI and a GUI component Both (linked from cask with binary)

Creating a Formula

Scaffold

brew create https://example.com/mytool-1.0.tar.gz

This auto-populates url, sha256, version, and opens the editor.

Key fields

class Mytool < Formula
  desc "One-line description (imperative, no trailing period, no 'A' prefix)"
  homepage "https://example.com/mytool"
  url "https://example.com/mytool-1.0.tar.gz"
  sha256 "abc123..."      # from: shasum -a 256 <file>
  license "MIT"
  version "1.0"           # omit if parseable from url

  depends_on "cmake" => :build           # build-time only
  depends_on "openssl@3"                 # runtime
  depends_on "[email protected]" => :optional  # optional runtime
  depends_on :macos => :monterey         # minimum macOS

  def install
    system "./configure", *std_configure_args
    system "make", "install"
  end

  test do
    system "#{bin}/mytool", "--version"
    assert_match "1.0", shell_output("#{bin}/mytool --version")
  end
end

Install directory variables

Variable Expands to
bin $(brew --prefix)/bin
lib $(brew --prefix)/lib
include $(brew --prefix)/include
share $(brew --prefix)/share
etc $(brew --prefix)/etc
var $(brew --prefix)/var
libexec $(brew --prefix)/opt/<name>/libexec

Read the full file on GitHub · 403 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 403 lines · 140 tokens per session scan A 1faacc05e195

Subscribe to this mod's changes

homebrew-dev is a skill published in the GitHub repository trtmn/agent-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Unlicense. It adds 140 tokens to every session and 2,957 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens