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tea — The Homebrew replacement from the maker of Homebrew
Introducing tea – the revolutionary, cross-platform, package manager. Automate dependencies and browse through hundreds of packages seamlessly. Say goodbye to slow & clunky, and say hello to fast & smooth.
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Chris Messina
Top Hunter
Hunter
📌
This is awesome! I'm a longtime homebrew user — but love the idea of a faster, more secure replacement... especially one made by the creator of homebrew!
I also appreciate the intention to find a way to support open source contributors just as the entire web lurches towards micropayments and remunerating the "plumbers and street sweepers" of the internet who thanklessly keep the place running.
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@chrismessina Thanks Chris for hunting tea! The open source ecosystem deserves a better package manager 😉
Hi Product Hunt!
14 years ago, I created Homebrew with the purpose of creating a tool that made it easier to develop and use software. It changed the way millions of developers work.
Now, a decade and change later, I’m doing it again.
I have always firmly believed that when building, tooling should get out of your way because you have much more important work to be doing. My first attempt with brew, solved the problem of installing dependencies. Now, with tea, you will never have to think about dependencies again.
In November we released tea/cli, an invisible yet powerful package manager for fans of the terminal. Today we’re releasing its graphical complement.
tea/gui is A FREE, OPEN SOURCE app that makes it easy for anyone to visually browse and manage hundreds of software packages.
👆 One-click installs. Instead of searching for install instructions in cluttered docs. You can install any software package (and the required dependencies) with ONE click.
🆕 Easy updates. Get notifications the moment a new update is available.
🔄 Version management. Take control of the exact package versions you want to install—without breaking any other installed packages.
🧩 Seamless integration. tea packages don’t install to your system, yet magically are there when you need them. tea also creates sandboxed, developer environments with only the packages your project needs without any virtualization overhead.
🔐 More secure. Don’t break your system with sudo; tea installs everything to your home directory.
🌐 Open source. We’re seasoned believers in open source to our very core with 60+ active contributors and growing. We also have aspirational goals to finally fix the open source funding problem. Once and for all. Stay tuned for that!
💪 Robust. Underneath is the powerful, fast and battle-tested tea/cli.
We are excited to build a world where developers can focus on their work instead of wrangling with dependencies.
And we’re excited to launch on PH and hear what you think of the product because we are only getting started and much more is yet to come!
Please provide us feedback: Open source software’s first and only priority is always its community!
@mxcl, congrats on the launch! So simple but so good 🤝
I've been using Homebrew for years, so really looking forward to trying this out.
@pronebird thanks for the feedback. We made a conscious decision to built the cli with deno and typescript to make use of a single binary + the added development speed that comes with the ecosystem.
Further down the road, we will explore a rewrite Rust :)
However as a developer, tea is incredibly fast already 🚀
Looks great 👍
It would be nice to be able to set up a fixed (voluntary) monthly contribution amount to distribute among the used packages authors automatically. (I saw that you plan to add some monetization, I’m just suggesting the model that makes sense to me.) Something along the lines of SetApp.
PS There’s a typo on the “open in terminal” image. “S” is missing in the word “constrained.”
Tea is an excellent application for those looking for a simple and intuitive way to manage their tasks and projects. It offers a wide range of features, including integration with other popular services such as Slack and Trello, as well as time management capabilities. Congratulations on your launch!
tea is amazing!
For a few months now, I have been using and integrating the tea CLI for an application development framework that I am authoring, called Stacks.js. I ended up choosing tea because it ended up being the most seamless (and cross-platform capable) dependency manager. Node, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and much more are included natively.
(Amongst other things, it was a great excuse to remove the fnm and nvm dependencies.)
Good luck with all of it! 🎉
Is this a replacement for brew, or can both coexist? How does it compare to brew – is it just brew with a UI? When I use brew I don't think about dependencies, I just `brew install firefox`, so now I can click a button that says "Install Firefox"? I'm trying to understand what's the breakthrough here, because brew "it just works", so why fix it?
@diogonunes thanks for your question, Diogo.
tea is sandboxed and doesn’t install anything in your /usr/local/bin by default.
tea makes it a lot easier to install software.
There are two products tea/cli and tea/gui.
tea/cli is a command line interface as you’d expect it from a package manager, but it comes with magic, which detect which package you’re trying running and if it doesn’t exist, tea will intercept and fetch the package (and it’s dependencies) for you.
tea/gui is the visual complement to tea/cli, which can also be used as a standalone app for non-developers who want to use open-source software like stable diffusion webUI, which is very complex to install. With tea, it’s just one click away.
Brew is good at installing stuff. Not so good at updating, keeping track of dependencies, making your workflow easier.
Your example is installing an app. However if you tried installing python with Homebrew it gets messy real quick.
@mfts0 Thanks for the insightful reply! I installed Python with brew and yes it was messy, haha. There's just so much effort put into my current setup that I don't dare replacing brew but if/when I switch laptop I will surely give it a try! Keep it up
@diogonunes just staying open-minded - that’s all we ask for :)
Do let me know when you get a chance to try it ;)
@diogonunes
brew isn't broken, but it is stagnant. For a long time I've seen a lot of potential in package management. It is after all the base of the stack, isn't there so much more that can be done than just installing and updating packages?
RN I'd say our main advantages are:
• cross platform (mac/Linux already windows native coming soon, we aim to support even obscure platforms like your NAS or router)
• developer environments, you can lock to specific versions of eg. python or node
• we update rapidly and really care about package availability and reliability (we also do things like codesign all mac packages for your security and peace of mind)
• we install to `~/.tea` and use “magic” to make tooling available to the tools you want without potentially messing up the rest of your system
• we're super fast
The gui is genuinely a complement to the cli. I see cli and gui as interfaces with different advantages and disadvantages. Currently the gui is super fun, but doesn't have a compelling advantage, but that will change quite soon we have some amazing things planned.
One neat thing the gui already has is the “open” button, so open source projects like Stable Diffusion web UI (which nobody else even packages) feel like apps on our “app store”.
I am already planning to package up way more of these kinds of things (eg https://github.com/nat/openplayg...) so that the gui can genuinely become a kind of app store for Open Source.
@mfts0 @diogonunes tea can be installed alongside brew. If you don’t like it you can just delete `~/.tea` and its gone. Though to use it well in the cli currently we recommend adding our magic which currently requires you to run `sh <(curl tea.xyz) --magic` if you installed the cli via the gui. This adds a one-liner to your shell’s rc file which becomes dormant if you uninstall ~/.tea, or you can remove it.
Congrats on a successful launch. The GUI is very fun and future-forward. I explored a bunch, clicking around, and everything worked as expected. Excellent job putting together such a tight product right out of the gate!
Looking forward to seeing what packages and apps find their way into the pantry.
Congrats on the launch! @mfts0 and team - awesome job!
I use tea for my projects, works smoothly.
@iuliia_shnai Thank you Iuliia for the support! It's cool to see what you already built using tea as a non-dev and it's an inspiration for other end-user understanding the power of open-source!
I contributed to a lot of open source software, but tea is one of those rare projects that will last forever! Just like it's predecessor, Homebrew.
I believe this is a game-changer from Developer Experience POV. @mxcl thanks for always inspiring the Open source ecosystem! Kudos to the makers!
To me as an open source founder tea looks very promising. Congrats on the launch and keep up the good work 🙌
Congratulations on the launch of the Tea sounds like an exciting new cross-platform package manager that offers a seamless and efficient way to automate dependencies and browse through hundreds of packages. Its focus on speed and smoothness is especially appealing, as many other package managers can be slow and clunky.
This revolutionary tool is sure to be a game-changer for developers and programmers looking to streamline their workflows and simplify the process of managing dependencies. The ability to browse through a large number of packages and automate dependencies will undoubtedly save time and effort, while also ensuring that software projects are running smoothly.
Kudos to the team behind Tea for developing such an innovative and useful tool. It's exciting to see how technology is constantly evolving and improving, and Tea is a great example of this progress. I look forward to seeing how this tool will continue to transform the world of software development in the future.
@atharva_bondre1 thank you for the kind words! 🙏 We are very excited for the future as well!
I've been using tea for months, and it's great.
Especially the 'magics' part: when I set up a new laptop with my existing bashrc and aliases, they "just work" without manually installing everything, thanks to tea