Therefore, using brew switch is mostly useful when one wants to switch between two versions not too far apart. In some cases, a rebuild of the older version may become necessary.

(*) Please note that brew switch only works as long as all dependencies of the older version are still around. Note that the star * has moved to the newly activated version Let’s double-check what is activated: $ brew info postgresql We may activate it using brew switch: $ brew switch postgresql 9.1.5Ĭleaning /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.1.5Ĭleaning /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.3.2ģ84 links created for /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.1.5 We see that some older version is already installed. If you want to simply activate that previous version, brew switch is the easiest way to do this.Ĭheck with brew info postgresql (or brew switch postgresql ) whether the older version is installed: $ brew info postgresql If you have been using homebrew for longer and never removed older versions (using, for example brew cleanup), chances are that some older version of your program may still be around. In principle, this makes it pretty easy to switch between two installed versions. Only symbolic links to this folder are then installed globally. When homebrew installs a new formula, it puts it in a versioned directory like /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.3.1. Let’s start with the simplest case: 1) Check, whether the version is already installed (but not activated)

Feel free to add a note if you found the old version better.) *( I’ve re-edited my answer to give a more thorough workflow for installing/using older software versions with homebrew. TLDR: brew install See answer below for more details.

Brew install node version