Homebrew Cask¶

The cask half of Homebrew: pre-built macOS applications.

Homebrew is the umbrella project behind the brew CLI. mpm splits it into two managers over the same binary, this one for casks and Brew for formulae; a forced --cask selector keeps every call on the cask side. Casks ship macOS .app bundles and .pkg installers, so this manager is macOS-only.

mpm drives brew non-interactively with the same environment pins as Brew (analytics and hints off, HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE so the metadata refresh stays a separate sync) and the same >=6.0.0 floor (ask mode default, the --yes opt-out, and the tap-trust gate that Homebrew.trust_tap() clears for user/tap/name packages).

Note

Casks self-escalate: their artifacts (.pkg installers, kernel extensions) invoke sudo from inside brew, so mpm never wraps a cask command in its own sudo.

Caution

Casks flagged auto_updates true or version :latest update themselves, and brew upgrade skips them unless --greedy is passed. mpm supplies --greedy (to outdated and to upgrade --all) unless auto-updating packages are being ignored. --greedy conflicts with --formula, so this handling is cask-only and cannot fold into the base shared with Brew.

Home page: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask
Source: meta_package_manager/managers/homebrew.py
Version requirement: >=6.0.0

Platforms¶

🍎 macOS

Operations¶

Operation	Supported
`installed`	✓
`outdated`	✓
`search`	✓
`install`	✓
`upgrade`	✓
`upgrade_all`	✓
`remove`	✓
`sync`	✓
`cleanup`	✓

Ecosystem¶

Accepted purl types: pkg:cask
Maps to cask entries in Brewfile backups

Usage¶

$ mpm --cask installed
$ mpm --cask search "query"
$ mpm --cask upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:cask/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --cask upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-cask, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line¶

CLI names, in lookup order: brew
Arguments forced after each call: --cask
Environment forced on each call:
- HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1
- HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1
- HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS=1

The version is extracted from the output of brew --version with:

r"Homebrew\s+(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation¶

Homebrew Cask runs sudo from inside its own commands: mpm never wraps it, keeps an already-warm credential cache alive for those internal escalations, and warns when a mutating call goes silent on a terminal with a cold cache, since a password prompt may be hiding in the stream.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown¶

State of Homebrew Cask’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: 🚧 Same as brew (inherits)
Reference: Homebrew/brew#21129

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.