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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:

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', '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 => '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 explanation
cask metadata information about the cask (required)
url URL to the .dmg/.zip/.tgz file that contains the application
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)
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.
link relative path to a file that should be linked into the Applications folder on installation
prefpane relative path to a preference pane that should be linked into the ~/Library/PreferencePanes folder on installation
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)

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-text-3 SublimeText3
1Password 1password Onepassword (see NAMING NOTE)

NAMING NOTE

When a Cask's name does not map to a valid ruby class (like 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.

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:

  • :script (string) - relative path to an uninstall script to be run via sudo
    • :args - array of arguments to the uninstall script
    • :input - array of lines of input to be sent to stdin of the script
  • :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
  • :launchctl (string or array) - ids of launchctl services to remove
  • :files (array) - absolute path of files or directories to remove
    • should only be used as a last resort, since this is the blunt force approach

Good Things to Know

  • In order to find out the checksum for the file, the easiest way is to leave it blank and attempt installation. The checksum will fail and tell you what the real sha1 should be.
  • 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

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 you 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.

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. Write your commit message with:

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

See a note about git commit messages for a more thorough explanation.

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 on '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.

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, one way to play with changes is to symlink the rubylib folder to your Tap repository. So assuming your fork is cloned at ~/homebrew-cask you could do something like this:

$ cd $(brew --prefix brew-cask)
$ mv rubylib{,.orig}
$ ln -s $(brew --prefix)/Library/Taps/phinze-cask/lib rubylib

Now you can hack on ~/homebrew-cask and use the cli to interact with the code.

Mind the test suite!

If you're making changes - please write some tests for them! Also be sure to run the whole test suite before submitting (if you forget Travis-CI will do that for you and embarass you in front of all your friends). :)

<3 THANK YOU! <3