litellm/packaging/homebrew

Homebrew formula for the lite CLI

lite.rb is the canonical source for the Homebrew formula that installs the thin LiteLLM CLI (litellm[cli]). It lives here so it is versioned with the code, but Homebrew serves formulae from a tap, so it has to be published to the BerriAI/homebrew-litellm tap to be installable.

Once published, end users install with

brew install BerriAI/litellm/lite

which gives them the lite command (lite login, lite claude, lite models list, ...) without the proxy server runtime. For the full proxy server, they keep using pip/uv with litellm[proxy] or the Docker image.

Why a tap and not homebrew-core

The formula builds the published litellm sdist with the cli extra and resolves that extra's dependencies from PyPI at build time. homebrew-core forbids network access during install and would require every transitive dependency declared as a pinned resource, regenerated on each release. For a fast-moving CLI that tradeoff is not worth it, so this stays a tap formula.

Release runbook

The formula can only point at a published artifact, so it activates with the first litellm release that ships the cli extra (added in pyproject.toml).

1. Cut a litellm release whose pyproject.toml includes the cli extra and confirm it is on PyPI.
2. Fetch the sdist URL and checksum for that version: curl -fsSL https://pypi.org/pypi/litellm/<version>/json | jq -r '.urls[] | select(.packagetype=="sdist") | "\(.url)\n\(.digests.sha256)"'
3. Set url and sha256 in lite.rb to those values; version is parsed from url.
4. Copy lite.rb into the tap repo under Formula/lite.rb, then run brew install --build-from-source ./Formula/lite.rb and brew test lite to verify a clean build and that lite --help works.
5. Commit and push to BerriAI/homebrew-litellm.

Keep lite.rb here in sync with the tap copy so the in-repo formula stays the source of truth.