Brioche

Brioche Project Update - October 2025

Published on

By Kyle Lacy

Brioche is a new package manager and build tool that we're making from scratch! Build scripts are written in TypeScript, so you get type-checking and editor completions with no hassle. We have a growing package ecosystem, so you can bring your favorite languages and dev tools into your own projects!

Check out our docs if you want to give it a spin! If you like it, consider helping fund Brioche's development and hosting costs via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors, or check out other ways you can get involved with Brioche!

This month has been a really exciting one… both for Brioche, and for me personally!

Oh, and this month we also crossed 300 total packages! 🎉

Status report

Status report

Officially working part-time on Brioche!!

Officially working part-time on Brioche!!

Even before it’s initial announcement, I’ve worked on Brioche as a side project, working on it on nights and weekends. Making time to work on Brioche outside my dayjob as a full-stack developer while keeping enough downtime to not burn myself out has been a challenge, to say the least!

Well, as of this month, I’ve since switched from working from full-time to part-time at my dayjob (now as an independent contractor). So now, I work 3 days a week as my source of income, and I currently spend 2 days a week dedicated to Brioche! That frees up my weekends for resting or socializing or other side projects or other hobbies (or, to be honest, more work on Brioche— but I’m trying to get better at letting myself not work on Brioche whenever I have free time)!

I’m really really excited about this and there’s a ton more I could say!! But a few major ones:

Now taking donations / sponsorships!

Now taking donations / sponsorships!

Since I’m now working on Brioche as my part-time job (effectively), I felt it was finally the right time to start accepting patronage. If you’re interested in pitching in, I can take your money thorough either:

(there’s already a few links on the website pointing to both platforms— including on the new Get Involved page!— but it’s not consistent everywhere yet, so more links for both will probably show up in a few places)

I’m hoping that, as Brioche grows, a few folks would be willing to chip in enough to partially or fully cover Brioche’s recurring costs, or even to pay for more self-hosted hardware— like more build machines. Or if Brioche becomes a big success one day, it’d be a dream if those sponsorships could even sustain me for full-time work on Brioche indefinitely, or eventually be enough to pay to bring on other contributors part-time or full-time!

Small aside: this is something I’ve considered for a long time, but soliciting donations is something that I’ve felt a tinge of guilt around— I’m not sure why to be honest! But switching to part-time was enough of a push for me to finally go and get it set up. I’m staunchly against taking VC funding or other investments for Brioche, so asking for donations is the first step on the path to making Brioche sustainable long-term.

New docs for contributors

New docs for contributors

I added a few docs geared towards potential contributors:

Both pages are sort of a “first pass”, and I think both could use improvement / iteration (if you have ideas to improve them, contributions are welcome in the brioche.dev repo!)

I also added a new “Get Involved!” page. This was meant to be a catch-all for folks that would be interested in discussing Brioche (links to Zulip/Discord/GitHub Discussions), contributing to Brioche (links to docs pages on contributing), or supporting Brioche (links to Liberapay + GitHub Sponsors). I always wanted to link to more things in the header, but it’s kinda space-constrained especially on mobile, so this was what I came up as an “umbrella” to cover multiple semi-related links at once.

Build Python with optimizations

Build Python with optimizations

@jaudiger opened a PR to enable compiler optimizations and LTO for our python package: brioche-dev/brioche-packages#1522. A small change (and one that’s makes our CI runners sweat!), but a nice improvement for folks that use Python through Brioche!

More consistency fixes in brioche-packages

More consistency fixes in brioche-packages

@jaudiger got a lot of PRs in to help fix miscellaneous issues in brioche-packages— especially issues related to absolute paths and to live-update scripts:

Oh, and we had some discussions around the .pipe() method, and landed on our preferered style:

// Preferred:
recipe.pipe(function1).pipe(function2);


// ...instead of:
// recipe.pipe(
//   function1,
//   function2,
// );

See the discssion in #1594 for more context

Some packages CI / repo improvements

Some packages CI / repo improvements

@jaudiger added some PR templates for adding / updating packages in the brioche-packages repo: https://github.com/brioche-dev/brioche-packages/tree/main/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE (permalink).

GitHub doesn’t support templates for PRs (today), but this will be useful to help new contributors make sure everything that’s needed is in place for a new package!

Also, @jaudiger got some fixes in to the CI pipeline itself to check for formatting (#1417), and to skip checks during the “publishing” step (#1413)— which will help get new packages and package updates released faster!

Installer & release work

Installer & release work

It’s been a while since the last Brioche release back in April. There haven’t been any huge new features, but there have been a few minor fixes— and linux-aarch64 support!— so it’d be nice to get a new release out.

…that’s how I’ve felt for a while, but the current release process is pretty painful, with a lot of manual steps. So, I worked on cleaning up the mess that was our release process, and almost all the pieces are in place now:

As part of that work, I did publish a new prerelease build of Brioche: v0.1.6-rc.2 (don’t ask what happened to rc.1). This isn’t intended to be used directly, but was meant to kick the tires on the new work-in-progress automated release pipeline. There’ll also probably be one or more prereleases like this as a final pass.

Anyway, the hard parts should all be in place now. I’m really happy with how smooth the new release pipeline is turning out! Brioche v0.1.6 should be coming really soon!

Issues galore!

Issues galore!

I spent some time just opening issues for miscellaneous Brioche ideas and improvements. For me, this is helpful to keep track on what I want to work on next, to have things to link to when discussing Brioche features, and to help give others an idea on the direction Brioche is heading. Plus, it’s useful for collaboration in case others want to help out (I try to write pretty detailed issues!), and for gathering discussion.

If you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to comment on any open issues! A few that I’d like to call out that could use some discussion/feedback/ideas:

Housekeeping

Housekeeping

New packages

New packages

Since the last update, there were 50 new packages

During October, we just crossed a huge milestone: we now have over 300 packages total!!! 🎉

New packages:

Brioche core updates

Brioche core updates