How Do I Update a Formula with Homebrew?

You can update all outdated packages like so:

brew install `brew outdated`

or

brew outdated | xargs brew install

or

brew upgrade

This is from the brew site..

for upgrading individual formula:

brew install formula-name && brew cleanup formula-name

You will first need to update the local formulas by doing

brew update

and then upgrade the package by doing

brew upgrade formula-name

An example would be if i wanted to upgrade mongodb, i would do something like this, assuming mongodb was already installed :

brew update && brew upgrade mongodb && brew cleanup mongodb

Well, I just did

brew install mongodb

and followed the instructions that were output to the STDOUT after it finished installing, and that seems to have worked just fine. I guess it kinda works just like make install and overwrites (upgrades) a previous install.

You can't use brew install to upgrade an installed formula. If you want upgrade all of outdated formulas, you can use the command below.

brew outdated | xargs brew upgrade

I prefer to upgrade all homebrew formulae and homebrew cask formulae.

I added a Bourne shell function to my environment for this one (I load a .bashrc)

function updatebrew() {
set -x;
brew update;
brew cleanup;
brew cask upgrade --greedy
)
}

• set -x for transparency: So that the terminal outputs whatever Homebrew is doing in the background.
• brew update to update homebrew formulas
• brew cleanup to remove any change left over after installations
• brew cask upgrade --greedy will install all casks; both those with versioning information and those without