Installing HomeBrew on Apple Silicon Macs Natively Supported

If you’re a Homebrew fan and an Apple Silicon Mac user, you’ll be happy to discover the latest versions of Homebrew (3.0.0 and beyond) now natively support Apple Silicon architecture. You’ll still need Rosetta 2 to have some packages and formulae to work, but many are already native supported by the command line package manager.

For the unfamiliar, Homebrew is an open source package manager that allows advanced users to easily install and run a wide variety of command line tools and apps on the Mac within the Terminal. It’s quite popular with developers, sysadmins, network admins, infosec, unix and linux fans, and even just the geekier folks among us.

If you’re already running Homebrew you should be able to just update the package manager to get the latest version with native Apple Silicon support. Alternately, you can run the installer again.

Those interested can install Homebrew on an Apple Silicon Mac with the following command issued within Terminal, which is the same as the general Homebrew installation command for modern MacOS releases:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

As usual, you’ll need an admin password to authenticate and complete installation.

Some users may wish to opt-out of Homebrew’s default “Anonymous Aggregate User Behaviour Analytics” tracking, which you can do with the following command after installation:

brew analytics off

You can check packages on formulae.brew.sh if you’re curious whether or not they have native support for Apple Silicon.

If you already had Homebrew running on the Apple Silicon Mac but relying on Rosetta 2, you’ll probably want to update homebrew and your packages (and you should do this periodically anyway):

brew update

As noted, not everything supports Apple Silicon yet, and you may still need to use this Terminal workaround to run some x86 packages.

Troubleshooting Homebrew on Apple Silicon

While Homebrew should work fine on an Apple Silicon Mac, some users may experience issues if they transferred their data from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon ARM Mac.

You will want to be sure you have Rosetta 2 installed on the Mac, as not everything is native yet.

Many of the homebrew packages should work, but you may see various rosetta errors like “rosetta error: thread_suspend failed” sometimes, particularly when attempting to update Brew packages.

If you’re experiencing errors or quirks from a migrated Intel to Apple Silicon Mac, you may try uninstalling Homebrew and then reinstalling Homebrew, as it seems to resolve these issues:

First uninstall:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall.sh)"

Let the uninstallation process complete. You might want to reboot the Mac for good measure, but it may not be necessary (recall that rebooting clears tmp files and other caches.

Next, reinstall Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

And again let that process complete.

Remember if you uninstall Homebrew it will remove all packages associated with the tool, so you’d need to reinstall those again.

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New to Homebrew or just want a lead for some handy packages to try out? Check out some of best Homebrew packages for Mac.

Terminal offers a broad range of unix tools and handy capabilities that are otherwise tucked under the hood of MacOS. While the command line is generally for advanced users, if the subject interests you don’t miss browsing through our command line articles here.

Do you have any thoughts to add about running Homebrew on Apple Silicon Macs? Have any particularly noteworthy experiences, tips, suggestions, troubleshooting, or advice? Share in the comments!