Uninstall Homebrew Without Losing Your Package List

UninstallPublished Updated 3 min read

Homebrew ships an official uninstaller, and it does what it says. The surprise is the scope: it removes Homebrew, and it removes what Homebrew installed, and those two facts land differently depending on why you are here.

If you came to reclaim disk space, this is the largest single reclaim on most developer Macs. If you came because one formula misbehaves, this is far more than you wanted.

The official uninstaller

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"

Read it before running it. The script is short and it is the authoritative description of what is about to happen, which is more than any article can claim.

It supports --dry-run, and on a machine you care about that is the correct first invocation: it prints what would be deleted and changes nothing.

What the script actually deletes

The uninstaller removes the Homebrew prefix and the directories beneath it: bin, etc, include, lib, opt, sbin, share, var, Frameworks, and both Cellar and Caskroom.

Those last two are the point. The Cellar is where every formula's files live, and the Caskroom is where cask metadata lives. Removing Homebrew removes them, so every command line tool you installed through it goes at the same time.

It also clears ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew and ~/Library/Logs/Homebrew, the system-level Homebrew cache, /etc/paths.d/homebrew, and Homebrew-managed apps in /Applications and ~/Applications.

The uninstaller removes the Homebrew prefix including Cellar and Caskroom along with caches and logs, while configuration written by the packages themselves and shell profile lines remain.
The script takes the packages with it, not just the package manager. What it leaves is the configuration those packages wrote and the lines you added to your shell profile.

Write down what you have before you remove it

The inventory is not recoverable afterwards, and it is one command:

brew leaves > ~/Desktop/brew-formulae.txt
brew list --cask > ~/Desktop/brew-casks.txt

brew leaves lists the formulae you asked for rather than every dependency pulled in behind them, which is the list you actually want when rebuilding. On a new machine those two files turn a day of remembering into one brew install line.

Anything a package stored outside its own directory survives and is worth keeping: a Postgres data directory, a local database under /opt/homebrew/var, config in your home directory. The uninstaller removes var under the prefix, so a database that lives there goes with it. Copy it out first if it matters.

The message at the end that people scroll past

When the script finishes it can print that some possible Homebrew files were not deleted and that you may wish to remove them yourself, followed by the list.

That is the only place those paths are ever named. It usually happens because of permissions on directories Homebrew did not create, and the list is short. Copy it somewhere before closing the terminal, because rerunning the uninstaller on an already-removed install will not produce it again.

Your shell profile still mentions it

The uninstaller does not edit .zprofile, .zshrc, or .bash_profile. The eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" line you added at install time stays, and every new shell then tries to run a binary that no longer exists.

It is harmless and it is noisy. Remove the line, or leave it if you plan to reinstall.

Consider whether you want the smaller operation

Most reasons to uninstall Homebrew are better served by something narrower. brew cleanup reclaims old versions and cached downloads. brew uninstall <formula> removes one thing. brew autoremove drops dependencies nothing needs anymore. Whichever you run, Mole will show you what the prefix weighs before and after, which is the number that decides whether the full removal was ever necessary.

Rebuilding from the exported list

Once Homebrew is installed on the new machine, two commands restore what you had:

xargs brew install < brew-formulae.txt
xargs brew install --cask < brew-casks.txt

They stay separate because casks need --cask, and a mixed list fails on half its entries.

brew leaves rather than brew list is what makes this work. brew list includes dependencies, so replaying it explicitly installs hundreds of packages that should have arrived on their own, and brew autoremove will no longer touch them afterwards because you asked for them by name. brew leaves returns only what you actually installed and leaves the dependency graph to Homebrew.