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I'm looking for a a settings file in Homebrew for OS X that controls the build settings, similar to make.conf in Gentoo.

I want to tweak the make -j parameter to use more cores of my machine. The problem is, I can't find anything useful related to brew in /usr/local/etc. Is there a simple answer to this?

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Each brew has its own recipe for making. These are usually ruby files, IIRC. You can certainly customize them, but there are no system wide homewbrew settings that I know of. –  jakev Oct 26 '12 at 17:17

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As @jakev said, each Homebrew formula is a separate Ruby script. You can find them at


If you want to edit the way a specific formula builds, you can do that locally. The following will open your default editor with the locally cached formula.

brew edit name-of-formula

The reason for the absence of global build settings is simply that each formula might build in different ways, and editing yourself ("homebrewing") is explicitly encouraged.

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That's an interesting design decision, since it would make sense to store some parameters, such as the "-j" build option globally. MacPorts seems more structured (if less flexible) in this sense. –  Koffiman Oct 29 '12 at 16:00

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