Quarantine Post: Make Homebrew Work in China

While you are reading this post, I have probably been in quarantine for several days. Yes! I’m home, but in a hotel for now.

I have a lot of ideas that I want to work on. I’m not disclosing any of them, but the gist is that by realizing those ideas, I get to experience the same workflow as before but in a different country with some internet censorships. I will have to naturally get through them if I want to work in the same way as before.

The problem

The first issue I encountered, right off the bat, was not being able to use Homebrew normally.

By default, Homebrew relies on GitHub for their repo distributions. In China, accessing GitHub is extremely slow. I immediately realized this when I attempted to run brew update and it timed out with “443” errors.

The solution

Luckily, Homebrew has a huge Chinese community that has established repo sources in China. All I needed to do was to set the sources to one of the Chinese ones for homebrew, homebrew-core, and homebrew-cask. I’m using the ones set up by the University of Science and Technology of China:

1
2
3
4
5

git -C "$(brew --repo)" remote set-url origin https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/brew.git

git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/core)" remote set-url origin https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-core.git

git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/cask)" remote set-url origin https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-cask.git

I also need to change the environment variable HOMEBREW_BOTTLE_DOMAIN by adding this line to my .zshrc:

1

export HOMEBREW_BOTTLE_DOMAIN=https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-bottles/

To sum up, I can put the above code into a shell script change_source.sh:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14

#!/bin/sh
git -C "$(brew --repo)" remote set-url origin https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/brew.git

git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/core)" remote set-url origin https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-core.git

git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/cask)" remote set-url origin https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-cask.git

if [ $SHELL = "/bin/bash" ]; then # 如果你的是bash
  echo 'export HOMEBREW_BOTTLE_DOMAIN=https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-bottles/' >>~/.bash_profile
  source ~/.bash_profile
elif [ $SHELL = "/bin/zsh" ]; then # 如果用的shell 是zsh 的话
  echo 'export HOMEBREW_BOTTLE_DOMAIN=https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/homebrew-bottles/' >>~/.zshrc
  source ~/.zshrc
fi

To restore the sources, I have created a neat shell script restore_sources.sh that sets all sources back to GitHub:

1
2
3
4
5

git -C "$(brew --repo)" remote set-url origin https://github.com/Homebrew/brew.git

git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/core)" remote set-url origin https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core.git

git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/cask)" remote set-url origin https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask.git

Closing thoughts

That’s it for Homebrew - I will likely encounter more issues in the coming days as I spend more time working, so stay alerted for more :smiley:!.