BrewBar

A native SwiftUI menu-bar app for Homebrew on Apple Silicon, macOS 13 Ventura or newer. Run maintenance, browse installed packages, and manage updates from the menu bar with a live command console — no Terminal required.

Website & gallery · Download · macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon

🔒 Your password is never stored

Some casks (like Zoom) run a .pkg installer that needs administrator rights. When Homebrew asks for your Mac password, BrewBar prompts you securely and passes it straight to macOS sudo. Your password is never saved, never logged, never written to disk, never stored in the Keychain, never placed in command arguments or environment variables, and never sent over the network. It is held in memory for a single Homebrew command, then discarded.

Details — how it works, for the technically curious

In two lines: the password lives only in RAM for one Homebrew command — typed into a masked SecureField → BrewModel.passwordDraft, handed to AskpassBroker, then written to a private 0600 FIFO (named pipe) that the SUDO_ASKPASS helper streams to sudo's standard input. It is never placed in a command's arguments, in an environment variable, on disk, in the macOS Keychain, or in the console log.

The full path your password takes

• While you type it: an in-memory string bound to a masked SecureField. Nothing is written anywhere yet.
• On Submit: it is handed to a one-shot broker and the on-screen draft is cleared immediately.
• Reaching sudo: the broker writes it to a FIFO — an in-kernel pipe buffer, not a file on disk — inside a private per-command temp directory (mode 0700, the pipe 0600, owned only by you). A tiny helper script (the standard macOS SUDO_ASKPASS mechanism) reads from that pipe and passes the password to sudo. For a multi-step action (e.g. uninstalling an app that removes several services), you type it once and the rest are answered from memory.
• When it's destroyed: the draft is cleared on submit/cancel and whenever the prompt closes; the broker's in-memory copy and the temp pipe are deleted the instant the command finishes, is stopped, or the console is cleared. Nothing survives the command — let alone an app restart.

Where it is not

• Never in a command's arguments (argv) — brew and sudo are launched with fixed argument lists.
• Never in an environment variable — SUDO_ASKPASS holds the helper's path, not your password.
• Never in a regular file, the macOS Keychain, UserDefaults, or any preference.
• Never written to the console output, and never sent over the network.

Honest caveats

Swift strings aren't guaranteed to be zeroed by the runtime, so a transient copy may briefly remain in freed memory until reused — the same practical limit every GUI sudo front-end has. BrewBar best-effort zeroes its own byte buffer after use and holds the value only for one command. The entire mechanism is open source in src/Sources/BrewBar/AskpassBroker.swift, so you can read exactly what it does.

The panel

Everything lives in one menu-bar window:

Maintenance	Installed	Updates

• Maintenance — Update, Outdated, Upgrade, Cleanup, Autoremove, and Doctor, each a real brew command run with fixed, validated arguments.
• Installed — Browse installed formulae and casks with search, then uninstall with a confirmation. Homebrew's dependency checks stay active.
• Updates — See installed → current versions from brew outdated, and upgrade individually or all at once. Pinned packages are labeled.
• Console — Merged stdout/stderr in arrival order, timestamps, duration, and the real exit code. Stop escalates SIGINT → SIGTERM → SIGKILL.

Gallery images are native offscreen renders of BrewBar's interface, produced from its drawing code — not screen captures.

Features

• Native SwiftUI MenuBarExtra panel with no Dock icon.
• Search & Install: search all of Homebrew from the Installed tab — each result shows its description, version, and installed-state — and install formulae or casks with a confirmation. The installed list refreshes automatically.
• System / Light / Dark plus Papery Light and Papery Dark themes, saved across launches, with matching artwork.
• A visible version line and Close / Quit controls in the header. Close tucks the panel away while BrewBar stays in the menu bar; Quit is blocked while a command is running.
• Live, streaming, noninteractive console with bounded retention, Copy, Clear, and Follow.
• Locates brew from your login environment and shows the resolved path.

Install

1. Download and extract BrewBar-2.1.zip.

2. Drag BrewBar.app to your Applications folder.

3. Because BrewBar is open source and not notarized by Apple, macOS quarantines it on download. Run this once in Terminal to let it launch:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/BrewBar.app

4. Click the Terminal Mug glyph in the menu bar to open the panel.

This is a locally (ad-hoc) signed build, not Apple-notarized. The command above clears macOS's quarantine flag so the app opens cleanly; alternatively you can right-click → Open the first time or approve it in Privacy & Security. BrewBar requires an existing Homebrew installation at /opt/homebrew.

Publishing

See PUBLISHING.md for how the repository and website are structured and how to enable GitHub Pages.

Status & licensing

BrewBar is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Homebrew. It runs the brew binary already installed on your Mac. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

BrewBar is released under the MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 Ahmad Farid Abbas.