Increasingly I rely upon libraries and applications installed via Homebrew. In addition the commands for listing installed brews, searching for new brews, or installing brews, there are several maintenance commands that should be run on a regular basis in order to keep your brews healthy and happy.
Rather then run these commands serially, and manually, I’ve created the following alias that runs them for me.
$ alias bu='brew update; brew upgrade; brew cleanup; brew doctor'brew update updates the Homebrew installation making sure you have the latest version installed. It also refreshes the list of available brews to their latest versions.
brew upgrade upgrades any brews you have installed to the latest version as provided for my the update step above.
brew cleanup removes outdated brews from your Cellar and keeps your installation tidy.
brew doctor verifies that all the components necessary for brew to work properly (like having the current Xcode command line tools) are in place and functioning.
Every day I take a moment to run bu in my Terminal and my Homebrew setup works reliably as a result.