Homebrew

Downgrading to an older version of a package

If the older version happens to still be locally available (true until Homebrew does one of its periodic cleanups), it will appear in brew info <package> and you can just brew install the locally available version directly. Homebrew can only install versioned packages that have explicit versioned formulas, i.e., package@version. There used to be a brew switch command that let you switch versions but Homebrew removed that around version 2.6 (see https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/339 for reasons). If the old version of the package is still installed as noted above, then these commands should hopefully work.

Otherwise, you have to create a local tap for the older package version and install that. These instructions seem to be reasonably up to date.

1. Find the package formula in the homebrew-core tap:

   brew tap-info homebrew/core
   cd <homebrew prefix>/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula

2. If you don’t already know which version you want, look in the commit log for the package formula:

   git log <package>.rb

3. Create new local tap and extract the package version to it:

   brew tap-new $USER/local-<package>
   brew extract --version=<version> <package> $USER/local-<package>

   Watch out for weird dependency issues—you might need to edit the extracted <package>@<version>.rb (which should be in /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/$USER/local-<package>/Formula).

4. Install as usual using the new tap (obviously uninstall the currently installed version first):

   brew install <package>@<version>