Homebrew: list available versions with new formula@version format

Homebrew recently deprecated homebrew/versions in favour of making versions available on homebrew/core via the new formula@version format. For example (as per this answer), you can do brew install [email protected].

Of course, this doesn't work for arbitrary versions. For instance, install [email protected] turns up "Error: No formulae found in taps".

Under the old method, I could run brew versions <formula> to see available versions. How do I list available versions now?

You can search versions using brew search.

For example:

$ brew search postgresql
postgresql ✔      postgresql@9.4     postgresql@9.5

This is an old question, but I found a "better" (for me) way to do this:

brew info --json PACKAGE_NAME | jq -r '.[].versioned_formulae[]'

For example, in the case of the package node, this will print:

$ brew info --json node | jq -r '.[].versioned_formulae[]'
node@10
node@12
node@8

You will need the program jq installed for it to drill down into the appropriate JSON, (brew install jq).

Since the above is gnarly to write/remember, I suggest setting up an alias or function in your favorite shell.

Note: This method will only work with Formulae and not Casks.

And in case you wanted to just look up the specific version used by a formula after finding it using search, you can get the info with:

brew info <formula|cask>

e.g. brew info postgresql@10, or brew info vlc. (Brew no longer needs to explicitly specify --cask for this command.)

And if you can't find a popular old version of a cask, you may be able to get it via homebrew-cask-versions, which is installable with brew tap homebrew/cask-versions.

To get the exact results without extraneous noise, you can use regex with brew search. It excludes qt-postgresql and postgrest, which would have been returned by brew search postgresql. This is especially helpful if you're searching for a short package name like r or git that would otherwise return a lot of noise.

$ brew search '/^postgresql$|^postgresql@/'

==> Formulae
postgresql          postgresql@11       postgresql@13       postgresql@9.5
postgresql@10       postgresql@12       postgresql@9.4      postgresql@9.6

Note, brew search does seem to support Extended Regex, so I couldn't use the more efficient regex below. Of course, you could use a grep pipe to accomplish the same:

$ brew search postgresql | grep -E '^postgresql(@.*)?$'

postgresql
postgresql@10
postgresql@11
postgresql@12
postgresql@13
postgresql@9.4
postgresql@9.5
postgresql@9.6