Install ninja with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• ninja

Project history

Evan Martin wrote Ninja while working on Google Chrome. In his Performance of Open Source Software chapter, he says he started Ninja in 2010 as an experiment to make Chrome builds faster, especially the front of the build where the tool loads build files and starts the first compile. This led to the design that made `.ninja` files simple, generated, and quick to parse.

The project became public and then broadened beyond Chrome. The same history says Ninja gradually replaced other build systems used by Chrome, CMake gained a Ninja generator, and projects such as LLVM and ReactOS used it through CMake. The Ninja homepage later summarized the tool as an assembler-like build system used by Google Chrome, parts of Android, LLVM, and many CMake-backed projects.

Adoption history

Ninja's adoption is unusually strong for such a small tool because it sits at the bottom of many developer workflows. Developers may never hand-write `build.ninja`, but they install Ninja because CMake, Meson, GN, or language build systems generate it and expect a fast executor.

On 2026-07-01, Homebrew listed Ninja 1.13.2 with 545,459 installs over 365 days and 352,367 installs-on-request. That install volume is a package-manager reflection of Ninja's role as a build substrate rather than a tool people necessarily think about directly.

How it is used

The normal package-nerd workflow is `cmake -G Ninja -S . -B build` or a Meson/GN equivalent, followed by `ninja -C build`. By default, `ninja` looks for `build.ninja` in the current directory and builds all out-of-date targets; flags such as `-C` and `-j` intentionally resemble Make, although Ninja already runs jobs in parallel by default.

Ninja build files are plain text and debuggable, but the project explicitly does not optimize for hand authoring. This makes the package easy to reason about in dependency graphs: if a formula or language package depends on Ninja, it usually means some higher-level generator will emit the actual build plan.

Why package nerds care

Ninja is one of the canonical examples of doing less and winning: no general-purpose project language, no rich conditionals, no policy layer, just a fast executor. Its package significance is huge because it became the common backend for CMake/Meson/GN-era native builds across macOS, Linux, Windows, and cross-platform CI.

Timeline

• {'date': '2010', 'event': 'Evan Martin started Ninja while working on Google Chrome.'}
• {'date': '2010s', 'event': 'Ninja spread from Chrome to CMake-backed projects including LLVM and ReactOS.'}
• {'date': '2025-07-10', 'event': 'Ninja homepage listed v1.13.1 as released.'}
• {'date': '2026-07-01', 'event': 'Homebrew formula listed stable Ninja 1.13.2.'}

Related projects

• CMake
• GN
• GYP
• Meson
• LLVM
• Chromium

Sources

• https://aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ninja
• https://ninja-build.org/
• https://ninja-build.org/manual