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: