Force download/install a particular bottle for a different platform than host system?

[jbarlow83]

Is there a probably way to ask brew to install a particular bottle

For example, from a macOS 10.15 machine, I'd like to download and install the bottle for arm64_big_sur so that the files can be used in cross compilation. Is there a way to do this short of scraping the formula?

[carlocab]

Try this:

ghp_url () {
        local formula=$1
        local version=$2
        command brew info --json=v1 $formula | jq --join-output ".[0].bottle.stable.files.${version}.url"
}

curl -L -H 'Authorization: Bearer QQ==' $(ghp_url hello arm64_big_sur) | tar -x

This will untar the unrelocated bottle tarball, so you'll probably need to make lots of use of install_name_tool.

Or you can maybe just download the tarball, make sure it's saved with the correct filename (using curl's -O flag won't work), then use brew install /path/to/tarball. You'll probably still need to make lots of use of install_name_tool anyway, because the ARM bottles are built with a different prefix.

This isn't a supported use-case, by the way, so we can't make promises about this working (and that this will keep working).

[jbarlow83]

Thanks for the thorough explanation - sounds like I'm better off doing a direct compile.