News

Announcing the official Elastic Homebrew tap

By
Jason Tedor
•
Michelle Sausa

We’re excited to announce the release of the official Elastic Homebrew tap.

Homebrew is referred to in its man page as "the missing package manager for macOS." It provides an easy and flexible way to manage the installation of software on macOS and is incredibly popular within the developer community. Core Homebrew provides formulae for installing common OSS software. A tap is a mechanism for third-parties, such as Elastic, to make additional software available to Homebrew users by providing additional formulae.

At Elastic, we're longtime fans of the Homebrew community and all the great work they do to support their users on macOS (e.g., supporting every major release of macOS on day one); they are made of win. Within Elastic, many of our engineers are Homebrew users themselves, and one of our employees is a Homebrew maintainer.

We always strive to meet our users where they are, and for many users, that’s Homebrew. That’s why we want to make sure that all of the Elastic Stack software is easily accessible for installation using Homebrew. Creating our own tap enables us to improve the user experience in a number of ways. First, you can now use the official Elastic Homebrew tap to access both the OSS and the default distribution, which includes free features such as  index lifecycle management (ILM), Elasticsearch SQL, and Canvas visualizations to name a few. And even better, the default distribution now includes free security, too. This is important to us as we aim to provide a consistent experience for users of the default and OSS distributions. A second motivation for creating our own tap is the ability it gives us to make sure that Homebrew users always have access to the latest versions of our software. By making Homebrew formulae updates in our tap an automated part of our release process, we can reliably make these updates available at the same time that we release all of our other artifacts.

Installing the Elastic Stack with Homebrew

Once you have installed Homebrew, getting started with the Elastic tap is simple:

  1. Tap the Elastic tap with brew tap elastic/tap.
  2. Install either the default or OSS distribution of Elasticsearch.
      • Default: brew install elasticsearch-full
      • OSS: brew install elasticsearch-oss
  3. If you include /usr/local/bin in your path, you can then start Elasticsearch with the command elasticsearch, or specify the full path /usr/local/bin/elasticsearch.

We provide all of the software in the Elastic Stack through this tap, including Elastic APM Server, Beats, Logstash, Kibana, and Elasticsearch. You can inspect the list of formulae available with: 

ls $(brew --prefix)/Homebrew/Library/Taps/elastic/homebrew-tap/Formula/*.rb

Last call

Homebrew is best enjoyed fresh so give the Elastic Homebrew Tap a try! And as always, your feedback is invaluable. Please reach out to let us know what you think on the repo, or in our Discuss forum.

Elastic believes in giving back, both by supporting the communities in which we live and work, and recognizing that participating in these activities can inspire and enrich our lives in unexpected ways. As part of the Elastic Cares program, we’ve made a donation to the Homebrew project, via the amazing folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy.

We believe that actions like these are important towards ensuring sustainable software and communities for fundamental open source projects — as Homebrew rightly is to numerous developers around the world.

"Logo of Homebrew" by Vítor Galvão, used under CC BY 4.0 / Resized and placed in header and thumbnail