In my previous guide we walked through installing and using Homebrew. Today we are going to look at extending Homebrew to support the installation of graphical applications. The kind you would normally drag to your Applications folder.
Homebrew Cask extends Homebrew. Bringing its simplicity and speed to the installation and management of GUI macOS applications such as Atom and Google Chrome.
To install an application or cask using Homebrew Cask you can run the following simple command:
brew cask install [application name]
An easy example that would install Spotify for example, is:
brew cask install spotify
To search for an application, do:
brew cask search [application name]
And finally, to remove an application:
brew cask uninstall [application name]
Homebrew provides a nice little web page for finding applications that are available to be installed and you can access this on the Homebrew website.
Sometimes you may find it useful to be able to install a different version of an application, if you want a beta release or to run a previous version. 1Password 6 or Google Chrome Beta are good examples here.
We do this by using the Homebrew tap command to connect in another repository. We will be using the homebrew-cask-versions repository from GitHub.
brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
And to install our specific version, we use this command:
brew cask install 1Password6