The name is intended to suggest the idea of building software on the Mac depending on the user's taste.

Originally written by Max Howell, the package manager has gained popularity in the Ruby on Rails community and earned praise for its extensibility.

[20] In February 2015, due to downtime at SourceForge which resulted in binaries being unavailable, Homebrew moved their hosting to Bintray.

[25] Version 3.0.0 was released almost exactly two years after 2.0.0, on February 5, 2021, and added official support for Macs with Apple silicon.

[27] On February 16, 2023, Homebrew version 4.0.0 was released which defaults to fetching Homebrew-maintained formulae from hosted JSON files rather than local Git-cloned taps.

[citation needed] The package manager builds software from source using "formulae", Ruby scripts constructed with the Homebrew domain-specific language (DSL) for managing dependencies, downloading source files, and configuring and compiling software.

[33] Homebrew collects installation, build error, and operating system version statistics via InfluxDB.