Trusting Homebrew Packages

Homebrew 6 introduced a new concept: tap trust. It means it can warn you about non-official taps you’re trying to install.

When you run brew doctor, it lets you know if there are untrusted taps:

Warning: The following taps are not trusted:
  unofficial-user/unofficial-tap-name

You can also list the untrusted taps and formulas with brew untrust:

Untrusted taps:
  unofficial-user/unofficial-tap-name
Untrusted formulae:
  unofficial-user/unofficial-tap-name/formula-name

If you trust the maker, you can trust the formula with:

brew trust --formula unofficial-user/unofficial-tap-name/formula-name

(You can also trust the whole tap, but it’s usually better to narrow the trust down to just the formulas you want.)

If you decide you don’t need to trust a formula or a tap (maybe it’s something you installed to test something you don’t actively use any more), you can uninstall a formula with:

brew uninstall formula-name

or even remove the whole tap:

brew untap unofficial-user/unofficial-tap-name