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CONTRIBUTING.md

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How To Contribute

So you want to contribute to the project. THIS IS GREAT NEWS! Seriously. We're all pretty happy about this.

Getting Set Up To Contribute

  1. Fork the repository in GitHub with the 'Fork' button
  2. Add your GitHub fork as a remote for your homebrew-cask Tap
github_user='<my-github-username>'
cd "$(brew --prefix)"/Library/Taps/phinze-cask
git remote add $github_user https://github.com/$github_user/homebrew-cask

Adding a Cask

Making a Cask is easy: a Cask is a small Ruby file.

Here's a Cask for Alfred.app as an example. Note that you may repeat the link stanza as many times as you need, to create multiple links:

class Alfred < Cask
  url 'http://cachefly.alfredapp.com/Alfred_2.0.6_203.zip'
  homepage 'http://www.alfredapp.com/'
  version '2.0.6_203'
  sha1 'fcbcc1c0076bbd118c825e0e3253246244e65396'
  link 'Alfred 2.app'
  link 'Alfred 2.app/Contents/Preferences/Alfred Preferences.app'
end

Here is another Cask for Vagrant.pkg

class Vagrant < Cask
  url 'http://files.vagrantup.com/packages/22b76517d6ccd4ef232a4b4ecbaa276aff8037b8/Vagrant-1.2.6.dmg'
  homepage 'http://www.vagrantup.com'
  version '1.2.6'
  sha1 '5f3e1bc5761b41e476bc8035f5ba03d42c0e12f0'
  install 'Vagrant.pkg'
  uninstall :script => { :executable => 'uninstall.tool',
                         :input => %w[Yes] }
end

To get started, use the handy dandy brew cask create command.

brew cask create my-new-cask

This will open $EDITOR with a template for your new Cask. Note that the convention is that hyphens in the name indicate casing in the class name, so the Cask name 'my-new-cask' becomes MyNewCask stored in my-new-cask.rb. So running the above command will get you a template that looks like this:

class MyNewCask < Cask
  url ''
  homepage ''
  version ''
  sha1 ''
  link ''
end

If you are submitting a non-stable version of an application that already has a cask (e.g. beta or nightly), then the Cask should be submitted to the caskroom/versions repo.

Fill in the following fields for your Cask:

field description
cask metadata information about the Cask (required)
url URL to the .dmg/.zip/.tgz file that contains the application (see URL Details for more information)
homepage application homepage; used for the brew cask home command
version application version; determines the directory structure in the Caskroom
sha1 SHA-1 Checksum of the file; checked when the file is downloaded to prevent any funny business (can be omitted with no_checksum)
artifact info information about artifacts inside the Cask (can be specified multiple times)
link relative path to a file that should be linked into the Applications folder on installation (see Link Details for more information)
install relative path to pkg that should be run to install the application
uninstall indicates what commands/scripts must be run to uninstall a pkg-based application (see Uninstall Support for more information)

Additional fields you might need for special use-cases:

field description
prefpane relative path to a preference pane that should be linked into the ~/Library/PreferencePanes folder on installation
colorpicker relative path to a ColorPicker plugin that should be linked into the ~/Library/ColorPickers folder on installation
qlplugin relative path to a QuickLook plugin that should be linked into the ~/Library/QuickLook folder on installation
font relative path to a font that should be linked into the ~/Library/Fonts folder on installation
widget relative path to a widget that should be linked into the ~/Library/Widgets folder on installation
service relative path to a service that should be linked into the ~/Library/Services folder on installation
binary relative path to a binary that should be linked into the ~/usr/local/bin folder on installation
input_method relative path to a input method that should be linked into the ~/Library/Input Methods folder on installation
screensaver relative path to a screensaver that should be linked into the ~/Library/Screen Savers folder on installation
nested_container relative path to an inner container that must be extracted before moving on with the installation; this allows us to support dmg inside tar, zip inside dmg, etc.
depends_on_formula a list of Homebrew Formulae upon which this Cask depends
caveats a string or Ruby block providing the user with Cask-specific information at install time (see Caveats Details for more information)
after_install a Ruby block containing postflight install operations
after_uninstall a Ruby block containing postflight uninstall operations

URL Details

In most cases, a plain URL is all you need to specify for Cask to download and extract a file. Sometimes, additional information is required for the curl-based downloader to successfully fetch the file. There are a few options to help in these cases, which are specified in a hash as a second argument to url.

option description
:cookies a hash of cookies to be set in the download request
:referer a URL to set as referrer in the download request
:user_agent user agent string to set for the download request. can also be set to :fake, which will use a generic Browser-like user agent string. we prefer :fake when the server does not require a specific user agent.

SourceForge URLs

SourceForge projects are a common way to distribute binaries, but they provide many different styles of URLs to get to the goods.

We prefer URLs of this format:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/$PROJECTNAME/files/latest/download

This lets the project maintainers choose the best URL for download.

If the "latest" URL does not point to a valid file for a Mac app, then we fall back this format:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/$PROJECTNAME/$FILENAME.$EXT

Naming Casks

We try to maintain a consistent naming policy so everything stays clean and predictable.

Start From the App's Canonical Name

  • do your best to find the canonical name for the title of the app you're submitting a Cask for
  • however the author writes the app name is how it should be styled; this can usually be found on the author's website or within the application itself;
  • pay attention to details, for example: "Git Hub" != "git_hub" != "GitHub"

Cask Name

A Cask's "name" is its primary identifier in our project. It's the string people will use to interact with this Cask on their system.

To get from an app's canonical name to a Cask name:

  • all lower case
  • spaces become hyphens
  • digits stay digits
  • examples

Casks are stored in a Ruby file matching their name.

Cask Class

Casks are implemented as Ruby classes, so a Cask's "class" needs to be a valid Ruby class name.

When going from a Cask's name to its class name:

  • UpperCamelCased
  • wherever a hyphen occurs in the Cask name, the class has a case change
  • invalid characters are replaced with English word equivalents

Cask Naming Examples

These illustrate most of the naming rules in our policy.

Canonical App Name Cask Name Cask Class
Audio Hijack Pro audio-hijack-pro AudioHijackPro
VLC vlc Vlc
BetterTouchTool bettertouchtool Bettertouchtool
iTerm2 iterm2 Iterm2
Akai LPK25 Editor akai-lpk25-editor AkaiLpk25Editor
Sublime Text 3 sublime-text3 SublimeText3
1Password 1password Onepassword (see NAMING NOTE)

NAMING NOTE

When a Cask's name does not map to a valid Ruby class (for example, when it starts with a number) there's an incoming feature to allow Cask classes to indicate the proper name using a keyword.

This feature is not yet complete, so you'll see some __Cask name__s that don't fully conform to the rules. For example, currently the Cask for 1Password is called onepassword instead of 1password.

When all this is sorted out, this message will go away.

Font Casks

Fonts are maintained separately. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md in the homebrew-fonts repository.

Link Details

In the simple case of a single string argument to link, a symlink is created in the target ~/Applications directory using the same name as the source file. For example:

link 'Alfred 2.app'

causes the creation of this symlink

~/Applications/Alfred 2.app

which points to a source file such as

/opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/alfred/2.1.1_227/Alfred 2.app

Renaming the Target

You can rename the target link which appears in your ~/Applications directory by adding a :target key to link, like this:

link 'Alfred 2.app', :target => 'Jeeves.app'

The :target key works in a similar way for these Cask fields as well: binary, colorpicker, font, input_method, prefpane, qlplugin, service, and widget.

Subfolders in .zip and .dmg

When the application is in a subfolder within a downloaded .zip or .dmg, that folder's name must be included in the link field in order for the app to be installed. So, if the downloaded zip unzips to a folder 'TexmakerMacosxLion' containing texmaker.app, the link must be specified as:

link 'TexmakerMacosxLion/texmaker.app'

Linking to the .app file without reference to the containing folder will result in installation failing with a "symlink source is not there" error.

Uninstall Support

Since OS X has no standard uninstall behavior, there's a wide variety of methods by which applications can be uninstalled. The uninstall directive has many features to help properly remove a Cask-installed application.

These features are utilized via a hash argument to uninstall with any number of the following keys:

  • :early_script (string or hash) - like :script, but runs early (for backward compat, best avoided)
  • :launchctl (string or array) - ids of launchctl services to remove
  • :quit (string or array) - bundle id of running applications to quit before proceeding with the uninstaller
  • :kext (string or array) - bundle id of kext(s) to unload from the system before proceeding with the uninstaller
  • :pkgutil (string or regexp) - regexp matching bundle id(s) of packages to uninstall using pkgutil
  • :script (string or hash) - relative path to an uninstall script to be run via sudo; use hash if args are needed
    • :executable - relative path to an uninstall script to be run via sudo (required for hash)
    • :args - array of arguments to the uninstall script
    • :input - array of lines of input to be sent to stdin of the script
  • :files (array) - absolute paths of files or directories to remove
    • should only be used as a last resort, since this is the blunt force approach

Each defined uninstall method is applied according to the order above. The order in which uninstall keys appear in the Cask file is ignored.

Caveats Details

Caveats as a String

When caveats is a string, it is evaluated at compile time. Use this only for a static message in which you don't need to interpolate any runtime variables. Example:

caveats 'Using this software is hazardous to your health.'

Caveats as a Block

When caveats is a Ruby block, evaluation is deferred until install time. Here you may refer to the Cask instance in your message to the user:

caveats do
  puts "Using #{@cask} is hazardous to your health."
end

Caveats Mini-DSL

There is a mini-DSL available within caveats blocks.

The following methods may be called to generate standard warning messages:

method description
manual_installer(path) The user should execute an installer to complete the installation. path may be absolute, or relative to the Cask.
path_environment_variable(path) The user should make sure path is in their $PATH environment variable
logout The user should log out and log back in to complete installation
reboot The user should reboot to complete installation
files_in_usr_local The Cask installs files to /usr/local, which may confuse Homebrew
arch_only(list) The Cask only supports certain architectures. Currently valid elements of list are intel-32 and intel-64

Example:

caveats do
  manual_installer 'Little Snitch Installer.app'
end

And the following methods may be useful for interpolation:

method description
title the Cask title
caskroom_path eg /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom
destination_path where this particular Cask is stored, including version number, eg /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/google-chrome/stable-channel

Good Things To Know

  • In order to get the SHA-1 checksum for the file, the easiest way is to run shasum <file>. A few casks use SHA-256 checksums instead of SHA-1 checksums: they replace the sha1 field with a sha256 field. The easiest way to get the SHA-256 checksum is to run shasum -a 256 <file>.
  • If the application does not have versioned downloads, you can skip the checksum by specifying no_checksum, which takes no arguments.
  • We have some conventions for projects without version-specific URLs. latest is a common version for those, but you can grep through the existing Casks for other examples.
  • One method for finding package bundle id(s) is the following:
    1. Unpack /path/to/my.pkg (replace with your package name) with pkgutil --expand /path/to/my.pkg /tmp/expanded.unpkg.
    2. The unpacked package is a folder. Bundle id(s) are contained within files named PackageInfo. These files can be found with the command find /tmp/expanded.unpkg -name PackageInfo.
    3. PackageInfo files are XML files, and bundle id(s) are found within the identifier attributes of <pkg-info> tags that look like <pkg-info ... identifier="com.oracle.jdk7u51" ... >, where extraneous attributes have been snipped out and replaced with ellipses.
    4. Once bundle id(s) have been identified, the unpacked package directory can be deleted.
  • Package kernel extensions (kexts) are also contained in PackageInfo files (see previous bullet point for finding them). Once the PackageInfo files have been located, grep for kext. If any kernel extensions are present, a command like grep -i kext /path/to/PackageInfo should return a <bundle id> tag with a path attribute that contains a .kext extension. One example of a <bundle id> containing a kext comes from WavTap: <bundle id="com.wavtap.driver.WavTap" ... path="./WavTap.kext" ... />; extraneous attributes have been snipped out and replaced with ellipses.

Testing Your New Cask

Give it a shot with brew cask install my-new-cask

Did it install? If something went wrong, brew cask uninstall my-new-cask and edit your Cask to fix it.

If everything looks good, you'll also want to make sure your Cask passes audit with

brew cask audit my-new-cask --download

If your application and homebrew-cask do not work well together, feel free to file an issue after checking out open issues.

Indenting

All Casks and code in the homebrew-cask project should be indented using two spaces (never tabs).

Submitting Your Changes

Hop into your Tap and check to make sure your new Cask is there:

cd "$(brew --prefix)"/Library/Taps/phinze-cask
git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       Casks/my-new-cask.rb

So far, so good. Now make a feature branch that you'll use in your pull request:

git checkout -b my-new-cask
Switched to a new branch 'my-new-cask'

Stage your Cask with git add Casks/my-new-cask.rb. You can view the changes that are to be committed with git diff --cached.

Commit your changes with git commit -v.

Commit Messages

For any git project, some good rules for commit messages are

  • the first line is commit summary, 50 characters or less,
  • followed by an empty line
  • followed by an explanation of the commit, wrapped to 72 characters.

See a note about git commit messages for more.

The first line of a commit message becomes the title of a pull request on GitHub, like the subject line of an email. Including the key info in the first line will help us respond faster to your pull.

For Cask commits in the homebrew-cask project, we like to include the Application name, version number, and purpose of the commit in the first line.

Examples of good, clear commit summaries:

  • Add Transmission.app v1.0
  • Upgrade Transmission.app to v2.82
  • Fix checksum in Transmission.app Cask

Examples of difficult, unclear commit summaries:

  • Upgrade to v2.82
  • Checksum was bad

Pushing

Push your changes to your GitHub account:

github_user='<my-github-username>'
git push $github_user my-new-cask

Filing a Pull Request on GitHub

Now go to your GitHub repository at https://github.com/my-github-username/homebrew-cask, switch branch to your topic branch and click the 'Pull Request' button. You can then add further comments to your pull request.

Congratulations! You are done now, and your Cask should be pulled in or otherwise noticed in a while.

Squashing

If your pull request has multiple commits which revise the same lines of code, it is better to squash those commits together into one logical unit.

But you don't always have to squash -- it is fine for a pull request to contain multiple commits when there is a logical reason for the separation.

Cleaning up

After your Pull Request is away, you might want to get yourself back on master, so that brew update will pull down new Casks properly.

cd "$(brew --prefix)"/Library/Taps/phinze-cask
git checkout master

Neat and tidy!

Working On homebrew-cask Itself

If you'd like to hack on the Ruby code in the project itself, please see HACKING.md.

<3 THANK YOU! <3