macos fswatch and watchman

[thoroc]

I have tried both ubi and github backends for fswatch and watchman and it is failing to get them installed. Both are available through homebrew.

• fswatch seems to not provide any build so the release is just the projects packaged up
• watchman isn't even installed using mise use -g ...

Unsure how either can be unblocked, but they must be providing some binaries somewhere, unless the brew recipe is doing all the work.

[risu729]

The binaries are built and saved as bottles, but are not provided by the projects.
Technically, we can use them with the new backend plugin system.

[risu729]

It was released just 3 days ago, so not at this moment. I might make it later.

[jdx]

bottles will not work well at all. They use hardcoded paths from /opt/homebrew and don't support non-latest versions. There's nothing mise can do about this, it's not what homebrew is built for.

[risu729]

Oh I didn't know that. Thanks for letting me know.

[TyceHerrman]

@risu729, how can one check out the homebrew plugin?

[risu729]

I didn't make it, see jdx comment.

[Marukome0743]

This is now supported through mise’s built-in Homebrew bottle integration in [bootstrap.packages], without requiring Homebrew itself:

[bootstrap.packages]
"brew:fswatch" = "latest"
"brew:watchman" = "latest"

Then run:

mise bootstrap packages apply

I verified that both fswatch and watchman install and run successfully on macOS arm64. During testing, watchman --version returned 2026.07.27.00.

There was also a remaining Linux-specific problem: watchman-diag is a Python zipapp containing binary data, so mise incorrectly treated it as an ordinary fixed-width binary and could not relocate it to the longer Linuxbrew prefix. PR #11632 fixes this by relocating the shebang while preserving the ZIP payload. I also verified the fix using the actual Watchman bottle on Linux arm64.

The fix has now been merged into main and should be included in the next mise release.

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