Downgrade to a Previously-installed Brew Formula

02 November 2017

Here's how to install an old, previously-installed brew formula.

(tested on Hombrew 1.36)

Deprecated: List Available Versions on Tap

There used to be a command, brew versions, where you'd try to list the versions of a formula ready to install. If I was looking for hugo versions, I'd type brew versions hugo.

This no longer works. I get:

$ brew versions hugo
Error: Unknown command: versions

List Previously-installed Versions

You can use a different command, however, to list versions of a package that you have previously installed on your machine:

$ brew list --versions hugo
hugo 0.18.1 0.21 0.30.2

I have 3 versions I've installed before. Thankfully, 0.18.1 is still there, because that's the one I want to downgrade to.

Switch to Different Formula Version

There's an easy switchero I can pull to downgrade to the previously-installed version:

$ brew switch hugo 0.18.1
Cleaning /usr/local/Cellar/hugo/0.18.1
Cleaning /usr/local/Cellar/hugo/0.21
Cleaning /usr/local/Cellar/hugo/0.30.2
28 links created for /usr/local/Cellar/hugo/0.18.1

My task is now essentially done. I did try a couple other things along the way though.

Install Specific Version

I saw a bunch of Internet advice to install specific versions using the @VERSION suffix, a la npm, such as brew install hugo@0.18.1. This does not work in most cases.

It only works in the case of those packages that publish a formula actually named using that format. postgresql is such a package.

You can list the published formulas related to a package name using the command:

$ brew search postgresql
==> Searching local taps...
postgresql                             postgresql@9.4                         postgresql@9.5                         postgresql@9.6
==> Searching taps on GitHub...
caskroom/cask/navicat-for-postgresql                                           caskroom/cask/photo-supreme-postgresql
==> Searching blacklisted, migrated and deleted formulae...

There was also some advice that I read about how to install any arbitrary version of a formula previously published on homebrew by finding the git commit hash and using that. I never went through the trouble of trying this.

How to do you install old formulas on homebrew?