app_not_upgrading.md

Why some apps aren’t included in upgrade

After running brew upgrade, you may notice some casks you think should be upgrading, aren’t.

As you’re likely aware, a lot of macOS software can upgrade itself:

That could cause conflicts when used in tandem with Homebrew Cask’s upgrade mechanism.

If you upgrade software through it’s built-in mechanism, that happens without Homebrew Cask’s knowledge so both versions get out of sync. If you then upgraded through Homebrew Cask and we have a lower version on the software on record, you’d get a downgrade.

There are a few ideas to fix this problem:

• Try to prevent the software’s automated updates. That won’t be a universal solution and may cause it to break. Most software on Homebrew Cask is closed-source, so we’d be guessing. This is also why pinning casks to a version isn’t available.
• Try to extract the installed software’s version and compare it to the cask, deciding what to do at that time. That’s a complicated solution that breaks other parts of our methodology, such as using versions to interpolate in urls (a definite win for maintainability). That solution also isn’t universal, as many software developers are inconsistent in their versioning schemes (and app bundles are meant to have two version strings) and it doesn’t work for all types of software we support.

So we let software be. Installing it with Homebrew Cask should make it behave the same as if you had installed it manually. But we also want to support software that does not auto-upgrade, so we add auto_updates true to casks of software that can do it, which excludes them from brew upgrade.

Casks which use version :latest are also excluded, because we have no way to track the version they’re in. It helps to ask the developers of such software to provide versioned releases (i.e. have the version in the path of the download url).

If you still want to force software to be upgraded via Homebrew Cask, you can:

• Reference it specifically in the upgrade command: brew upgrade {{cask_name}}.
• Use the --greedy flag: brew upgrade --greedy.

Refer to the upgrade section of the brew manual page by running man -P 'less --pattern "^ {3}upgrade"' brew.