Install several versions of KOPS via Homebrew

When there are multiple Kubernetes clusters created using KOPS, there is a need to keep multiple versions of KOPS to manage different clusters and/or environments. I use MacOS and Homebrew for this purposes and below are some notes about installaton process.

As the first step we clone Homebrew repository:

git clone [email protected]:Homebrew/homebrew-core.git

Switch to the repository directory, check git log history and find SHA hash of a version we would like to install:

git log master -- Formula/kops.rb

You’ll see an output like below:

git log master -- Formula/kops.rb
commit ad99d239dbdf08022296fd89b38675aef0601aa2
Author: William Ma <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Jul 2 11:49:06 2020 -0400

    kops: add license

commit 146785591dc25cafffc7ea177aed1f20aadd22e4
Author: BrewTestBot <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Jul 6 08:08:29 2020 +0000

    kops: update 1.17.1 bottle.

commit 529f81ea23925d7ed4fd2da4210e18b91d90a097
Author: Caleb Xu <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Jul 6 01:29:48 2020 -0400

    kops 1.17.1

    Closes #57534.

    Signed-off-by: Sean Molenaar <[email protected]>
    Signed-off-by: BrewTestBot <[email protected]>

commit f6b1352c077e71e5964263edf73d165d8397dd71
Author: BrewTestBot <[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Jul 4 23:10:21 2020 +0000

    kops: update 1.17.0 bottle.

I interested into version 1.17.0, so I copy commit SHA hash: f6b1352c077e71e5964263edf73d165d8397dd71.

To allow upgrades for our formula:

brew unpin kops

and remove it from from /usr/local

brew unlink kops

At this point we’re safe to install required version (Note: you should replace commit SHA hash with required in the URI):

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/f6b1352c077e71e5964263edf73d165d8397dd71/Formula/kops.rb

Once it’s installed we can check a version and use it:

kops version
Version 1.17.0

In case if we want to keep this version and don’t upgrade we should pin it:

brew pin kops

To switch version of kops use:

brew switch kops 1.17.1