N8n via homebrew

Is there any way to add n8n to homebrew?

Welcome to the community @onlineworkflow!

I looked. Apparently yes. You can create a tap. Here the information on the homebrew page:

Unfortunately I can’t do it, as it seems like you have to be the admin of the git to initiate the process.
However, after you do it once, it updates everything going forward.

I changed the topic to feature request. We will prioritize depending on community interest.

PRs are obviously always welcome.

I’m a big fan of Homebrew, so thanks for the request!

Would be really helpful to understand your thinking on this, @onlineworkflow: is Homebrew simply the default way you try anything new out? Do you not have Node.js installed by default and it would be extra effort to figure out how to do so? Is it something else?

I think a Homebrew install could be useful for others, but just want to make sure we get a good picture of why.

Homebrew is my main entry point to a litany of interesting software that’s hosted on github and elsewhere.

It’s a seamless experience to both find new things, as well as batch update existing services.

My push for n8n to have a presence on it are as follows:

  1. It would continue to bring awareness to n8n among a community that’s already technically inclined to benefit from it.
  2. It would allow those who value useful services, but are not big github users (aka people like myself) to get it up and running sooner
  3. It would allow users to keep on top of updates seamlessly.
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i like the question…

and the answer, but i question this phrase

I use homebrew for installing commandline tools and software that i want to run on my workstation.
I think that it is of course possible to offer n8n via brew.
I don’t think that it is the best way to get started with n8n, nor the best way to go forward using it.

Either you want to hack on n8n and you fork the repo and make PRs
(like me and more than 1400 others)
– OR –
You want to use n8n without hacking on it, and will need a self-hosted or cloud based solution
(that will be much more useful if it is available beyond your workstation / LAN)

gitpod && decent docker-compose templates, serverless platform configs, and a great offering at n8n.cloud ought to be far higher priority than homebrew.

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We are actually also thinking about creating an Electron (or similar) version of n8n to make it very simply for people that do not have Docker or Node.js to get it up and running locally. So they can give it a spin, do some local automations or anything else which does not have to run 24h. People could then literally download one file and start it.

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Hi I just wanted to jump in here and add that a homebrew package would make it much easier to keep the desktop version of n8n up to date! I regularly run “brew upgrade” to update all of my packages, so if I could install n8n via homebrew then I would no longer have to worry about running a separate update process for n8n.

Hey all, there’s a Homebrew Tap for the npm version here now:

https://github.com/n8n-io/homebrew-n8n

There’s no formula for the desktop version yet though.

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