`list` (& `search`?) output to Brewfile format

[erikw]

Problem(s) addressed

I manage my Homebrew installations with a few Brewfiles. The workflow is for a new app installation is that a new app from the App Store must be installed the very first time for each Apple Account, either with

• the App Store.app GUI
• or with $ mas purchase <id>,

and then after this, if I'm happy with the new app, I can add an entry in my Brewfile to mark this app as now included in my system base setup.

This last step is a bit cumbersome, as the format for mas in Brewfile is very different from the output of the mas commands. After having installed the software from the App Store.app, I could use mas to find the ID, e.g. with

$ mas list | grep Numbers
409203825   Numbers                   (13.2)

or

mas search Numbers
   409203825  Numbers                         (14.4)

Now I have to manually copy the output from these commands, 409203825 Numbers and transform this in my editor to the format of a Brewfile, which is very different,:

mas 'Numbers', id: 409203825

This is a text transformation process involving:

• Swapping the order of the two words
• Adding single quotes around the name
• Adding a comma after the name
• prefixing id: before the ID.

Luckily Vim has many functions to transform with some strokes, but it's still quite a lot of hands-on to maintain a Brewfile with mas entries!

Proposed solution(s)

It's quite easy, I would imagine, to make working with Brewfile + mas together better. If the list (maybe search too?) commands had an optional switch, say -b , to list the results in Brefile format, it would be a matter of copy&paste or even redirect the output to append to a Brewfile directly!

$ mas list -b | grep Numbers
mas 'Numbers', id: 409203825

Alternative solution(s)

No response

Additional context

No response

[rgoldberg]

• JSON output will be added in the future (JSON output option #190). The whole output system will be overhauled in the process (Output overhaul #626). Once JSON can be output, the jq command (which will be depended on by the new mas) can be used to easily transform from JSON into Brewfile. Either you can do it in a script, it can be added as an output formal option to the shell wrapper script for said future mas version, or probably best for Homebrew to add it to brew bundle because they are in charge of the Brewfile format.

[lo-yuta]

hello, don't know if it is wanted or not but currently the version 2.3.0 returns error if there are not applications installed with mas, shouldn't it just return a simple empty list?

[rgoldberg]

@ta-yuhyeon A new output framework was instituted that ensures that all error output actually results in a non-zero return code.

list has output an error when no applications are found since before I started working on the project, but that error output didn't ensure a non-zero exit code.

I did a search and replace to transition from the old output code to the new output framework, but now I'll look through all error output to ensure that it should actually be an error. Anything that shouldn't be an error will be switch to something else (presumably a warning), and the exit code will be zero. I'll try to get to this sometime before the end of next week, but hopefully earlier.

Thanks.