Chug

The fastest way to consume Homebrew bottles.

Installation

To install the latest release:

curl -fsSL https://chug.bend.nz/install.sh | sh

Or, to install from source:

cargo install chug-cli

Usage

chug add $formula_name
chug remove $formula_name
chug update

Rationale

Homebrew is the de-facto standard package manager for 3rd-party development tools on macOS. Most of these tools are built using "formulae" and their pre-built binaries can be downloaded as "bottles". However, Homebrew still requires that users download a significant portion of the Homebrew toolchain to install bottles. Chug aims to improve on Homebrew in the following ways:

• Single-purpose
  • Chug can only download and manage bottles
• Efficiency
  • Chug is pre-compiled to a single binary (no more Ruby DSLs)
  • Chug is written in Rust
  • Chug downloads and extracts bottles in parallel
  • Chug extracts bottles as they are being downloaded
  • Chug avoids using external programs where practical
  • Chug avoids creating temporary files where practical
  • Chug assumes the user will only install a given version once, so there is no point in caching bottle downloads
• Cleanliness
  • Chug installs packages on a per-user basis
  • Chug avoids changing permissions for /usr/local, /opt/homebrew, etc.
  • Chug follows the XDG Base Directory Specification and installs binaries to ~/.local/bin (configured via $XDG_BIN_HOME)

TODO List

• Issues around patching on macOS (particularly for python@3.13)
• Linux support
• curl -fsSL https://chug.bend.nz/install.sh | sh
• chug list and chug tree

Non-goals

To keep this project fast and maintainable, the following are non-goals:

• Casks or building formulae from source
• Non-Homebrew sources