How Workbrew Works

Workbrew is a secure software delivery platform — a control center for all of the software packages installed on the endpoints at your organization. It’s also the best way for teams familiar with Homebrew to deploy, manage, and secure brew at scale.

How It Works

Workbrew has four main components:

Homebrew

Workbrew sits on top of Homebrew, so to understand Workbrew you need to first understand Homebrew.

Homebrew is an open-source package manager with an extensive library of official packages. It’s installed on tens of millions of devices and it’s nearly ubiquitous on macOS. Homebrew is also supported on Linux and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), although these users are less common. For our purposes, it’s useful to focus on two primary components:

brew, the command-line interface (CLI) for managing packages.
Taps, the repositories where packages are defined.

brew

The brew CLI provides the underlying infrastructure for installing packages onto the target system. It has a variety of useful subcommands and configuration options, you can read more about how to use brew in the official documentation.

Taps

Taps provide the underlying definitions and instructions for installing specific software packages onto the system. Homebrew has two official Taps: homebrew/homebrew-core and homebrew/homebrew-cask. In addition to the official Taps, it’s possible to use unofficial third-party Taps and even to create your own.

Who Is Workbrew For?

This all adds up to secure software delivery platform that:

Has zero-touch installation and enrollment, which allows you to remotely set up all of your organization's devices to a standard profile.
Enables your developers with the tools that they know and love, while maintaining security and compliance.
Eliminates the learning curve. Your developers already know it, and nobody else ever needs to touch it.

So then, Workbrew is for any business or organization that wants to:

bulk manage their fleet’s software use, or
let their developers use brew while remaining secure and compliant, or
automate remote device setup, even on brand new fresh-from-Apple devices, or
any combination of the three.

Within an organization, Workbrew adds value for everyone:

For developers, Workbrew drives productivity.

They don’t need to learn a new tool and they don’t need to spend time working around corporate security measures.

For IT professionals, Workbrew reduces workload.

Workbrew automates a large portion of device setup, and drastically reduces touchpoints for the remainder.

For security professionals, Workbrew is peace of mind.

With Workbrew’s ability to remotely manage policies on their entire fleet, they can easily do preventative maintenance and are able to quickly respond to situations.

For everyone else, Workbrew is seamless and invisible.

It automates maintenance for software, security, and compliance. They can just keep on doing their thing while Workbrew works its magic to keep their software secure and up to date.

Start Free Today

Start using brew at work with our Free Plan. Deploy to unlimited devices via our hassle-free installer, seamlessly integrated with your MDM for zero-touch setup. Workbrew’s Secure CLI preserves the familiar brew experience for developers, while giving IT total visibility into packages and versions across your fleet.

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