How to publish your NodeJS application on Homebrew?

date

Apr 25, 2021

slug

how-to-publish-your-nodejs-project-on-homebrew

status

Published

Preparing the binaries

The first step is to create a standalone executable binary where the NodeJS runtime will be baked inside the binary file. For this, I made use of an awesome tool pkg by Vercel.

This will take package.json as input and bundles all the dependencies along with the NodeJS Alpine runtime.

You can also configure the packaging behavior by adding the following in the package.json file.

You will now have a binary executable in the release/ directory, in my case:

Creating Tar File

Homebrew expects a TAR archive, and it’s easy to create one using the commands: In my case

At this point, you should have the getfilesize.tar.gz file in your release directory.

We also need to get the hash of this tar file while we create Homebrew formula.

We can calculate easily that using

Creating GitHub Releases

Homebrew requires a URL to download your binary. There are plenty of ways to host your executable, but for my project, I used GitHub Releases, mainly because it’s free, easy to use, and my project is hosted on it.

Open your project’s GitHub page, navigate to the Releases section and then click on Create a new release.

Insert a tag version, such as 0.0.1, a title, and then drag the previously created archive ( in my case getfilesize.tar.gz ) into the upload section. You should have something like this:

Now click Publish release to publish the release.

On the Release page, you’ll need to grab the archive URL. Expand the Assets section and copy the URL of the getfilesize.tar.gz archive you’ve just uploaded. In my case:

Save it somewhere, we will need it later.

Preparing the GitHub Repository

Homebrew offers a way to create third-party repositories via Taps. In a nutshell, Taps are just GitHub repositories with specific names and a few configuration files.

We will need to create one to host our project as follows,

Where projectname is the name of your project. In my case it is homebrew-getfilesize

Creating the Formulae

Please clone the homebrew-getfilesize repository created in the previous step in your local machine. Now you will need to create a Homebrew Formula for your project, a very simple Ruby file containing the instructions to install your binary on the user computers.

Please note that Ruby knowledge is not required here. (I don't know ruby, psst... don't say to anyone)

We will need to create the following folder structure,

In the getfilesize.rb file, paste the following content:

Here,

desc - A short description of the package. You can reuse the same from package.json homepage - The URL of the repository. url - The path where the TAR file is hosted. The one we got from the release page. version - Your package version. The one you entered while creating GitHub release. license - License of the package

And finally, change getfilesize with your binary executable filename, obtained from the first section:

Now commit and push your changes to GitHub remote.

Installing the Package

All right, if you are with me till here, your users are ready to install the package using Homebrew:

Where <user-name>/<repository-name> is your GitHub username combined with the project name. You can ignore the homebrew- prefix while installing and tapping the Formula.

Next Steps

This was a very basic way to publish your package on Homebrew, but things can get much better. In fact, we can automate the packaging process via Github Actions. DM me if you would like to discuss more on the setup.

If you liked the article and want to stay up to date, follow me on Twitter or GitHub.

References

Homebrew Docs