Install specific version of Hugo via Homebrew

[marksou]

I've been trying to help a co-worker install the specific version of Hugo we use. When running brew install hugo@0.64.1 it comes back saying it can't find the formula. Is there anything else that needs to be done or do we need to find an alternative method?

[SMillerDev]

Homebrew-core only ships the latest version of software so this won't work. It might be beneficial for your company to use brew extract to extract the specific version you need into a tap so all colleagues can use the same versions.

[carlocab]

brew doesn't let you install arbitrary versions of formulae out of the box, I'm afraid. What you can do is the following:

brew tap-new marksou/your-tap-name-here # create your own tap if you don't already have one
brew extract --version=0.64.1 hugo marksou/your-tap-name-here # extract the version of Hugo that you need to your tap
brew install marksou/your-tap-name-here/hugo@0.64.1

You can also modify your formula before installing it with

brew edit marksou/your-tap-name-here/hugo@0.64.1

[marksou]

Thanks

[carlocab]

Sure. If you have multiple users using the same version, you may wish to push your tap to GitHub (a tap is just a Git repo).

You can find the repo at $(brew --repo marksou/your-tap-name-here). You'll want to create a repository called homebrew-your-tap-name-here and push your tap there.

Then, other users can install the version in your tap with

brew install marksou/your-tap-name-here/hugo@0.64.1

Here's some more relevant documentation:

https://docs.brew.sh/Taps
https://docs.brew.sh/Interesting-Taps-and-Forks
https://docs.brew.sh/How-to-Create-and-Maintain-a-Tap
https://brew.sh/2020/11/18/homebrew-tap-with-bottles-uploaded-to-github-releases/

[TheAbstract]

@carlocab Thanks, very helpful. Saved from having to find *.rb files in Formula from commit histories 😌, as mentioned in most answers to this online.
FYI: for those that don't need create a tap, the required steps can be simplified like this:

brew extract --version=0.51 hugo homebrew/cask
brew install hugo@0.51

Note: unless it's just for personal use, I highly recommend creating a tap as described above #2941.

[chriszrc]

@carlocab these instructions didn't work for me on a brand new MacBook with Monterey. It appears homebrew was trying to build hugo from source, and running into all kinds of errors. What worked was to install the binary from github:

https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/tag/v0.79.0

Following these instructions - https://datacenterjourney.com/2021/install-specific-version-hugo-macos/