Heartbleed, Shellshock, Meltdown, Spectre.. it’s dangerous out there! More than ever it’s important to keep your tools up to date. On your average server, you probably have a cron job running to periodically check for software updates. But what about your work machine? Do you remember to check brew, npm, pip and the like from time to time? I can tell you that I don’t. And I don’t want to.

So here’s my pragmatic approach to keeping your tools up to date: On every new shell I spawn, check for software updates, but only once a day. (So if I already checked for updates today, just exit and let me continue).

And if you’re smart about it, this doesn’t just update command line software! On macOS, you can install and update your App Store software using mas and (almost) everything else with homebrew-cask.

It’s a simple, but super effective approach. Open a shell, hit enter, that’s it. (If you’re impatient, you can even open another Terminal and start working there, but be careful running software which might be updating in the background..)

I put everything in a GitHub repo so you can make use of this for yourself. If there’s a smarter or in other ways better approach to this, please let me know and otherwise - have a fantastic day! 🙂