bru

A fast, Homebrew-compatible package manager for macOS

⚠️ Experimental: Production-ready for bottle-based workflows, but under active development.

Drop-in replacement for brew with 8x faster operations. Works with Homebrew's formulae and bottles—no migration needed.

Why bru?

Same formulae, same ecosystem, dramatically faster.

Installation

Via Homebrew

brew install nijaru/tap/bru

Via Cargo

cargo install kombrucha

Usage

CLI: Works like brew. See bru --help for all commands. Unsupported commands automatically fall back to brew.

Library: For Rust projects that need programmatic Homebrew access. See docs/library-api.md for complete API reference and examples.

Limitations

Source builds (~5% of formulae without precompiled bottles) automatically fall back to brew.

Compatibility

Works with Homebrew v4.x on:

• macOS 13+ (Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia)
• Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3)
• Intel (x86_64)

Documentation

• Library API - Programmatic access for Rust projects
• Architecture - System design and internals
• CHANGELOG - Version history

Testing

# Run all tests
cargo test

# Build release binary
cargo build --release

Contributing

Contributions welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0

Made by nijaru