Setting up auto brew update using crontab



This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Faris Durrani

On MacOS, brew is a package manager that helps install, manage, and update packages using the terminal, and crontab is a scheduler that runs commands at specific times at specific intervals.

You can use https://crontab.guru/ to help you create an interval of your own using the format:

[minute: 0-59] [hour: 0-23] [day: 1-31] [months: 1-12] [weekday: 0-6]

For this example, you can set a crontab schedule to run brew update (to get info on the latest versions of packages) and brew upgrade (to actually install the latest versions) at 12:00 local time every Monday by adding the following line to your crontab -e entry.

0 12 * * 1 /opt/homebrew/bin/brew update && /opt/homebrew/bin/brew upgrade

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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Faris Durrani