pkgstory

Every package has a version story. pkgstory mines a package manager's git history into a browsable timeline — which version shipped, and when — for every formula and cask. When a package is deprecated, disabled, or dropped from the tap (like terraform after its BUSL relicense), it says so — with the date and Homebrew's own reason — instead of trailing off at a stale last version.

Website: pkgstory.dev

The name: pkg + story — the version story of a package; pkg, not brew, because it's built to outgrow Homebrew.

brew log git runs git log on one formula file, on your machine. pkgstory is the layer that isn't there: commits deduped into real version events, casks included with their own version semantics, the whole catalog searchable, and a per-package RSS feed for each one. Repology answers where a package exists; pkgstory answers how its version has changed over time. Homebrew is the first source.

How it works

Every Homebrew version bump is a commit to a single file (Formula/g/git.rb, Casks/v/visual-studio-code.rb). The crawler turns that history into a four-layer index, drawn so the expensive extraction happens exactly once:

• L0 — commit index. One streaming pass over git history records every commit that touched a package file, keyed by basename so Homebrew's historical file relocations don't matter. Stores each commit's blob_sha, so nothing downstream re-walks history.
• L1 — snapshots. The blob at each commit, parsed for version, revision, and the package's current deprecate!/disable! lifecycle. Lean today; richer fields (dependencies, bottles, patches) layer in later by re-reading the same blobs — no re-crawl.
• L2 — version events. Snapshots collapsed into the timeline: one row per (version, revision) change, so bottle rebuilds and metadata-only commits drop out. This is what the site renders.

A git ls-tree pass over HEAD after each crawl reconciles which packages still exist in the tap — so a deletion (terraform) is recorded with its removal date and commit, immune to Homebrew's file relocations.

Serving it

The site is an Astro app on Cloudflare Workers, sized so traffic can't run up cost:

• Per-package pages read one package's rows from D1 (SQLite at the edge) through an indexed query, behind an edge cache.
• The home page and the search index (/packages.json, ~20k entries) are precomputed into Workers KV by the crawler and served as a single lookup — independent of how much traffic arrives.

A GitHub Action re-crawls every 30 minutes: it derives the delta since the last commit it saw, writes only the new version events to D1, and republishes the KV blobs. A small Cloudflare Worker (trigger/) fires that schedule on a reliable cron — GitHub's own schedule: trigger drops most fires. Deploys ship code, not data, so the site stays current without a rebuild.

Development

Requires Node 26+ (it runs the TypeScript directly — no build step) and, for crawling, a local Homebrew clone (homebrew/core and/or homebrew/cask).

just install                                    # install dependencies
just crawl                                      # build pkgstory.db from a curated demo set
just crawl --formulae git,wget --casks firefox  # or specific packages
just crawl --all                                # the full catalog (~20k packages)
just site-dev                                   # preview the site
just check                                      # everything CI runs

Run just install-hooks once per clone (DCO sign-off + pre-push checks). The crawl --d1 local|remote mode writes deltas straight to Cloudflare D1 and refreshes the KV cache — it's what the scheduled job runs.

License

Code is AGPL-3.0-only. The version-history data, mined from public git history, is CC-BY-4.0.