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.
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 Congratulations on the launch! I was initially drawn in by the name;) and was impressed by the concept. It's great to see a focus on making life easier for developers 👍. Best of luck with tea , and I look forward to seeing what's to come!
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.
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
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.
I guess I'm an early tea adopter and I prefer it to anything else. There's something so refreshing to having the same software stack on my macOS and Linux computers. It's so much easier than Docker for many tasks. This is the first community project that I've felt really good contributing to. Max and the tea team have been very responsive and it has been such a pleasure working with them.
@james_reynolds6 James, your a rockstar 🥳 Thank you for supporting our launch and your contributions on tea/cli and the many packages you have contributed already 💪
Congrats Max. I am disappointed to see CLI written in TypeScript and not in Rust or Swift or anything literally unrelated to Node. This is a deciding factor for me.
@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 🚀
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.
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.”
@combdn thanks for the feedback! We've got some exciting things coming down the pipeline in that regard and can't wait to tell the community. Also, thanks for the heads up re: the typo, should be amended shortly 😉
Although I often have to work with the terminal in my work, I honestly hate it. Tea Gui is just wow for me. Beautiful and user-friendly interface, installing/updating packages with just a click of a button. This is mega cool!
@and95 That means sooooo much to us, Andrii! Terminal has upsides and downsides, with tea/gui we want to bring the open-source ecosystem closer to everyone.
@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!
Hey, I am not a developer by myself, but I love the idea of the free and open source app, which simplifies work and life of many of the developers. They deserve it! Keep up the amazing work you are doing! 👍
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