Homebrew Upgrade Reports Success But Does Nothing

The CLI keeps telling me a new version is available, but brew upgrade reports success and nothing changes.

This happens when Homebrew hasn’t been told to trust the gigalixir/brew tap. Homebrew requires third-party taps to be explicitly trusted. When a tap isn’t trusted, a plain brew upgrade (and brew outdated) silently skips it instead of showing an error. There’s no reason to suspect Homebrew is the cause.

The fix is one command, run once:

brew upgrade gigalixir/brew/gigalixir

This upgrades the CLI and trusts the tap at the same time. After that, your ordinary brew upgrade keeps the CLI current on its own. You don’t need to keep using the long form.

If you haven’t installed the CLI yet, installing with the same fully-qualified form avoids this entirely:

brew tap gigalixir/brew
brew install gigalixir/brew/gigalixir

See the CLI installation instructions for the full install and upgrade commands.