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BrewMDM Open source · self-hostable

About BrewMDM

BrewMDM is a control plane for the Homebrew installs across a fleet of Macs. You run it on your own infrastructure, an agent runs on each managed Mac, and between them they answer two questions that get harder with every machine you add: what is actually installed out there, and when does it move.

Why it exists

Homebrew is how most Mac software gets installed by the people who build software on Macs, and it has no fleet story at all. Every machine upgrades whatever is newest, whenever somebody happens to run brew upgrade. That is exactly right for one laptop and unworkable for a hundred: two engineers on the same team end up on different versions of the same toolchain, a build breaks on one machine and not another, and nobody can say what is installed across the estate without asking each person individually.

The existing answers are device-management suites that treat Homebrew as an afterthought, or a pile of scripts that nobody owns. BrewMDM is the narrow tool instead — it does Homebrew across many Macs, properly, and does not try to be a general device manager.

What it is

  • A control plane you host. A server and a web console, deployed as a container against a Postgres database, on infrastructure you already run. It is multi-tenant, so one deployment can keep several estates apart.
  • An agent on each Mac. A signed daemon that reports what Homebrew has installed and applies the changes the control plane asks for, built for Apple Silicon.
  • A versioned protocol between them. The message contract is published as JSON Schema and both sides are generated from it, so an agent and a server can be upgraded independently without guessing at what the other understands.

What it is not

It is not a hosted service, and there is no account to create here. It has no telemetry, no phone-home and no licence check, so nothing about your fleet reaches us — there is no route by which it could. It is not a general-purpose device management suite: it does not manage configuration profiles, disk encryption or operating-system updates, and it is intended to sit alongside whatever you already use for those rather than replace it.

Where it is up to

BrewMDM is pre-release. There is no download yet and no public documentation; this site is a launch page and a notification list. It will be open source and self-hostable when it ships. If you want to know the day that happens, the form on the home page sends exactly one email and nothing else.

Who makes it

BrewMDM is made by M7KNI Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17385187, at Unit 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Road, Lytchett Matravers, Poole, England, BH16 6FA.

Questions, including from journalists and from people evaluating it for a team, go to hello@brewmdm.app. More ways to reach us are on the contact page, and what we do with anything you send is on the privacy page.