Replace applications on macOS with brew installed apps

gistfile1.txt

import os
import argparse
import shutil
import subprocess

def list_installed_apps():
    app_folder_path = '/Applications'
    app_list = [app.replace('.app', '') for app in os.listdir(app_folder_path) if app.endswith('.app')]
    return app_list

def list_cask_apps():
    return subprocess.check_output(['brew', 'list', '--cask']).decode()


def list_skipped_apps():
    return ['Numbers', 'Pages', 'Keynote']

def delete_app(app):
    app_path = f'/Applications/{app}.app'
    if os.path.exists(app_path):
        subprocess.run(['sudo', 'rm', '-rf', app_path])

def reinstall_brew_cask(app):
    subprocess.run(['brew', 'install', '--cask', '--force', app])


def search_brew_cask(app):
    try:
        output = subprocess.check_output(['brew', 'search', app, '--cask']).decode()
        return app in output.lower()
    
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
        return False
    

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--reinstall', action='store_true', default=False)
args = parser.parse_args()

args.reinstall = True

installed_apps = list_installed_apps()
cask_apps = list_cask_apps()
skip_apps = list_skipped_apps()

for app in installed_apps:

    if app in skip_apps:
        print(f'🌈 {app} skipped')
        continue

    if app in cask_apps:
        print(f'✨ {app} already casked')
        continue

    brew_app_name = app.replace(' ', '-').lower()
    
    if search_brew_cask(brew_app_name):
        print(f"⌛ {app} has a cask alternative.")

        if args.reinstall:
            delete_app(app)
            print(f'☠️ Deleted {app}')
            reinstall_brew_cask(brew_app_name)
            print(f'✅ Reinstalled {app}')

    else:
        print(f"⚠️ {app}")

This is brilliant. So good to have maximal usage of brew.

One thing -which may be specific to my setup: Applications that were in /Applications before, were in /opt/homebrew/bin after running the script, so could not be found. This was easily fixed by doing for f in $(brew --cask list); do if [[ ${f//term/} == ${f} ]];then brew uninstall $f; brew install --cask --no-quarantine $f; fi; done, which puts the applications back to /Applications, but I'm not sure why this does not happen straight away...

Thanks @amwink. Thanks for the improvement!

If you like this, you'll like this one as well: https://github.com/marijnbent/homebrew-interactive-install

I really like the noninteractive script version! Just saw that my --no-quarantine suggestion has not been valid for a while as brew have removed it. The Apple philosophy (even brew!) does not always promote free software... That discussion was pretty harsh in the end.