Anonymous Analytics

Homebrew gathers anonymous analytics using InfluxDB. You will be notified the first time you run brew update or install Homebrew. Analytics are not enabled until after this notice is shown, to ensure that you can opt out without ever sending analytics data.

Why?

Homebrew is provided free of charge and run entirely by volunteers in their spare time. As a result, we do not have the resources to do detailed user studies of Homebrew users to decide on how best to design future features and prioritise current work. Anonymous analytics allow us to prioritise fixes and features based on how, where and when people use Homebrew. For example:

How Long?

Homebrew’s anonymous analytics has a 365 day retention period in InfluxDB.

What?

Homebrew’s analytics record some shared information for every formula or cask event:

All analytics data previously sent to Google Analytics has been destroyed.

Homebrew’s analytics records the following different events:

You can also view all the information that is sent by Homebrew’s analytics by setting HOMEBREW_ANALYTICS_DEBUG=1 in your environment. Please note this will also stop any analytics from being sent.

It is impossible for the Homebrew developers to match any particular event to any particular user. We do not store or receive IP addresses.

When/Where?

Homebrew’s analytics are sent throughout Homebrew’s execution to InfluxDB over HTTPS.

Who?

Aggregates of analytics events are publicly available. A JSON API is also available. The majority of Homebrew maintainers are not granted more detailed analytics data beyond these public resources.

How?

The code is viewable in analytics.rb and analytics.sh. They are done in a separate background process and fail fast to avoid delaying any execution. They will fail immediately and silently if you have no network connection.

Opting out

Homebrew analytics helps us maintainers and leaving it on is appreciated. However, if you want to opt out of Homebrew’s analytics, you can set this variable in your environment:

export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1

Alternatively, this will prevent analytics from ever being sent:

brew analytics off
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