Apple - Determine flags that were given for packages installed with homebrew
When a package is built from source the flags that were used to build are shown when you do brew info <package>
.
In this case: brew info emacs | grep "Built from source"
There is a file in /usr/local/Cellar
underneath each package that is called INSTALL_RECEIPT.json
, e.g. for gawk
:
/usr/local/Cellar/gawk/4.1.3/INSTALL_RECEIPT.json
that defines how the package was installed. I think the correct way to access it is with
brew info --json=v1 <packagename>
e.g.
brew info --json=v1 gnuplot
That spews out loads of stuff, but if you send it through jq
(JSON Processor - handily available via homebrew
) you can select out the options you used to install the package like this (checking the gnuplot
package):
brew info --json=v1 gnuplot | jq '.[].installed[0].used_options'
[
"--with-qt"
]
which tells me I installed gnuplot
using:
brew install --with-qt gnuplot
Another useful tool is homebrew-bundler
. Once installed via brew tap Homebrew/bundle
, you can run brew bundle dump
and it will create a Brewfile file that lists all of the packages you have installed along with any additional args used to install them.