macOS
Homebrewverified · 100%
brew install cortexlocal Homebrew formula metadata
brew / rank 5978
Install cortex with Homebrew
Long term storage for Prometheus. Version 1.21.1 via Homebrew; verified 2026-07-25.
install
Additional install commands
overview
Package summary
Long term storage for Prometheus
Project links
Commands and aliases
- cortex
history
Project history and usage
Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant long-term storage system for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It is normally deployed as a server-side observability backend rather than used as a local CLI tool.
Project history
The official Cortex documentation states that the project was started by Tom Wilkie and Prometheus co-founder Julius Volz in June 2016. The public GitHub repository was created later in 2016, and the README describes a system built for scale, high availability, multi-tenancy, and long-term object storage.
Adoption history
Cortex's adoption history is tied to Prometheus remote write and cloud-native observability. The official documentation's further-reading section traces public talks from PromCon 2016 through KubeCon sessions, and lists managed or production-oriented material from Grafana Labs, AWS, CNCF, and other operators.
How it is used
Operators deploy Cortex as single-binary or microservices components. Prometheus instances push samples via remote write, while Cortex distributes, ingests, stores, and queries data across long-term storage backends such as S3, GCS, Swift, and Azure.
Why package nerds care
Cortex matters to package and infrastructure maintainers because it turns Prometheus from a single-node time-series database into a multi-tenant distributed system. Packaging is only a small part of the story; configuration, Kubernetes deployment, storage backends, ring state, and service topology dominate real-world distribution.
Timeline
- 2016: Cortex project started in June by Tom Wilkie and Julius Volz.
- 2016: Public GitHub repository created in September.
- 2018: Official documentation lists CNCF and KubeCon materials presenting Cortex as scalable Prometheus.
- 2026: Official GitHub releases include the v1.21.x series.
Related projects
- Related projects include Prometheus, OpenTelemetry Metrics, Thanos, Grafana Mimir, Alertmanager, and cloud object stores used for long-term metrics storage.
Sources
security posture
Risk level: orange
formula declares a Homebrew service.
Risk classifier
orange risk · medium confidence · infrastructure
Why
- formula declares a Homebrew service
Signals
- metadata:service
Install behavior
- No Homebrew bottle metadata was recorded.
Recommended review
Before unattended agent use, check whether the tool reads plaintext credentials, writes remote state, publishes artifacts, or shells out to plugins.
executables
Installed executables
| Command | Kind | Exposure | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
cortex | executable | indexed executable | Discovered from the local executable index. |
freshness
Version and freshness
These signals separate page generation age, package-manager activity, and upstream release comparison. Version lag is warned only when an evidence URL and comparable versions are present.
page generated2026-08-03
manager version1.21.1
manager updated2026-07-25
local dataunknown
upstreamnot available
latest detectednot detected
- okNo freshness warnings were generated.
install metadata
Package metadata
| Package key | brew:cortex |
|---|---|
| Version | 1.21.1 |
| Package manager | Homebrew |
| Homepage | https://cortexmetrics.io/ |
| Repository | https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex |
| Last updated | 2026-07-25T14:20:51-04:00 |
| Pulse | updated |
| Bottle | not recorded |
| Service | none declared |
source trail
Generated from repository data
This page is generated by av-web from the private package SQLite artifact built by scripts/generate-pkg-sqlite.py.
Combined YAML source
View the package source record on GitHub.
Used sources
- Geiger risk classifier
- cross-ecosystem install command graph
- curated package history
- pkg.so package database
- pkgdb category and tag curation