list-all-services-managed-by-brew.md

List All Services Managed By Brew

Daemonized services, such as PostgreSQL, can be installed and managed with Homebrew. Under the hood brew uses launchctl on Mac to manage these services — i.e. starting, restarting, and stopping them.

Assuming you've already installed some services, you can run brew services list to see what services there are and what their current status is.

$ brew services list
Name          Status  User       File
mailhog       none
mysql         none
postgresql@11 started jbranchaud ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql@11.plist
postgresql@13 none
postgresql@16 none
unbound       none

This is the default behavior if you just run brew services without a subcommand.

This is helpful if you are, for instance, trying to see which PostgreSQL server version you are currently running and which other ones are available to run. I might then issue a stop to postgresql@11 so that I can then start the postgresql@16 service.

See brew services --help for more details.