Install braid with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• braid

Project history

The GitHub repository for Braid was created in February 2008. Its official site frames the project around the old vendoring problem: projects often copied third-party source into their tree, then struggled to update it or send local changes upstream.

Braid's solution is to keep metadata about the external repository, branch, tag, revision, or subdirectory in .braids.json. That gives a plain Git repository enough memory to update a vendored copy later without converting the vendored directory into a nested repository.

Adoption history

The official documentation presents RubyGems installation with gem install braid, while the input facts record Homebrew packaging. Its audience is narrower than Git itself: teams that deliberately vendor source and need repeatable updates.

Braid remained useful where teams preferred checked-in source copies over package-manager references, especially when local patches or co-evolution with the upstream library made binary package dependencies awkward.

How it is used

Typical usage starts with braid add <repo> <path>, which vendors a remote Git repository into a project path and updates .braids.json. Later, braid update pulls upstream changes, braid diff emits local changes as a patch, and braid push can send local changes back to a source branch.

The documentation also covers pinning to branches, tags, or revisions and selecting subdirectories from a remote repository, making Braid a lightweight alternative to manual copy-and-patch vendoring.

Why package nerds care

Braid is interesting because it sits at the boundary between dependency management and version control. It preserves vendored source inside one repository while adding just enough metadata to make updates reproducible.

For package historians, it captures a pre-monorepo, pre-lockfile style of dependency handling common in Ruby and web projects: when package registries existed, but teams still wanted patched source in-tree.

Timeline

• 2008-02: The Braid GitHub repository was created.
• 2022-01: The documentation described supported environments as Linux, macOS, and Windows with recent Git and Ruby dependencies.
• 2024: The GitHub repository still showed recent activity in official repository metadata.

Related projects

• Git is the underlying version-control system Braid extends.
• RubyGems is the installation channel shown in Braid's official documentation.
• Manual vendoring by copying source trees is the workflow Braid was built to improve.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/cristibalan/braid
• https://cristibalan.github.io/braid
• source_facts.package-manager