Install mage with Homebrew, apk, apt, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, winget, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• mage

Project history

The public GitHub repository was created in September 2017, and the project reached its v1 release in October 2017. The official site describes the core idea as Makefile-like runnable targets written as plain Go functions, with no runtime dependency beyond Go itself.

Mage evolved around Go workflow conventions. Release notes and documentation added support for Go modules, versioned `go install` use, optional and variadic arguments, multiline help text, tab completion, and the `magefiles/` directory convention for keeping build files separate from normal application code.

Adoption history

Mage became a common package-manager install for developers who wanted a cross-platform replacement for Make in Go-heavy repositories. The official installation page documents Homebrew, MacPorts, Scoop, GitHub releases, `go install`, and asdf, while the Homebrew input data also lists Linux distribution, Nix, pacman, winget, and zypper package names.

The repository has several thousand GitHub stars and hundreds of forks, which is a useful adoption signal for a developer tool whose main audience is maintainers wiring project automation into local builds and CI.

How it is used

A typical project adds a mage file with the `mage` build tag and exported functions. Running `mage -l` lists targets, `mage <target>` executes one, and comments on functions become command help.

Mage is also used in CI and in vendored or zero-install workflows. The zero-install documentation shows how a project can run Mage through `go run` so contributors do not need a preinstalled `mage` binary.

Why package nerds care

Mage is package-nerd interesting because it trades Make's whitespace-sensitive shell DSL for Go code while still looking like a tiny command-line build tool to package managers. It sits in the same cultural slot as Make, Rake, Just, and Task, but its dependency story is unusually boring for Go users: install one CLI, write Go.

Its packaging footprint is broad for a niche build tool, and the docs explicitly cover binary releases and multiple package managers, which makes it easy to pin in CI images or bootstrap on contributor machines.

Timeline

• 2017: Public GitHub repository created.
• 2017: v1 release published.
• 2018: Go modules support documented in release history.
• 2021: `magefiles/` directory support released.
• 2026: v1.17.x releases continue the 1.x line with tab completion and help improvements.

Related projects

• Make and Rake are the direct inspirations named by the project description.
• Go task runners such as Task and Just occupy adjacent package-manager space, but Mage's distinguishing feature is that tasks are ordinary Go functions.

Sources

• https://github.com/magefile/mage
• https://github.com/magefile/mage/releases
• https://magefile.org/
• https://magefile.org/magefiles/
• https://magefile.org/zeroinstall/
• source_facts.package-manager
• source_facts.repo