Today I’d like to announce Homebrew 2.6.0. The most significant changes since 2.5.0 are macOS Big Sur support on Intel, brew commands replacing all brew cask commands, the beginnings of macOS M1/Apple Silicon/ARM support and API deprecations.

Major changes and deprecations since 2.5.0:

• macOS Big Sur is supported (and High Sierra unsupported)
• depends_on :java, brew switch, brew diy and various other APIs have been deprecated
• All brew cask commands have been deprecated in favour of brew commands (with --cask) when necessary
• Homebrew.args is deprecated
• All Requirements are deprecated in Homebrew/core
• macOS Homebrew running natively on M1/Apple Silicon/ARM has partial functionality. We recommend installing into /opt/homebrew and forbid installing into /usr/local (to avoid clashing with the macOS Intel install and allow their usage side-by-side). We currently recommend running Homebrew using Intel emulation with Rosetta 2.
• brew tap-new will set up GitHub Actions workflows to upload to GitHub Releases. Read the blog post for more documentation.
• GitHub deprecated their API’s basic authentication

Other changes since 2.5.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• brew doctor checks the active branch for all taps, not just Homebrew/homebrew-core
• brew unbottled is a new developer command to identify formulae that haven’t had binary packages built yet
• brew install ./ is now recommended for installing local file formulae
• Bash, ZSH and Fish formula completion is now much faster with the brew formulae command
• brew install --force-bottle refuses to ever build from source
• brew install or brew link of a versioned keg-only formula will automatically unlink conflicted version formulae
• brew shellenv is significantly faster
• Homebrew has further reduced shallow clone usage (on request from GitHub)
• brew linkage and commands using the linkage cache have significantly better performance
• brew bump-cask-pr is a new developer command to create Homebrew/homebrew-cask pull requests

Finally:

• Discourse and IRC are now deprecated as official communication methods in favour of GitHub Discussions.
• Homebrew accepts donations through GitHub Sponsors and still accepts donations through Patreon. If you can afford it, please consider donating. If you’d rather not use GitHub Sponsors or Patreon (our preferred donation methods), check out the other ways to donate in our README.

Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far. Enjoy using Homebrew!