Install suricata with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• suricata
• suricata-update
• suricatactl
• suricatasc

Project history

Suricata's official timeline traces the first code to Victor Julien and Matt Jonkman in 2007, with William Metcalf joining shortly afterward. The first public beta arrived on New Year's Eve 2009, followed by the founding of OISF and the Suricata 1.0 release on March 1, 2010.

The project grew around an open foundation model, training, conferences, and recurring stable release lines. Official documentation describes Suricata as a high-performance IDS, IPS, and network security monitoring engine owned by a community-run non-profit foundation and developed by OISF.

Adoption history

Suricata is packaged broadly across Unix-like systems. The input package facts list Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Alpine, Arch, MacPorts, Nix, and openSUSE names; official download pages also publish source releases, Windows installers, Ubuntu PPA channels, and RPM packages.

Community adoption is also visible in OISF's timeline: public training began in 2013, SuriCon began in 2015, and later SuriCon events drew international users, developers, vendors, and security teams.

How it is used

Suricata is typically configured through `suricata.yaml`, run as a packet inspection service or command-line tool, and paired with rule management through `suricata-update`. The quickstart walks users through choosing interfaces, editing `/etc/suricata/suricata.yaml`, installing rules, restarting the service, and reading EVE JSON output.

Why package nerds care

Suricata matters to package nerds because it sits at the intersection of kernel packet capture, distro service management, ruleset updates, YAML configuration, JSON logs, and fast C/Rust-ish systems engineering. Installing the package is only the start; the interesting work is wiring rules, interfaces, logs, capabilities, and updates into a reproducible host setup.

Timeline

• 2007: First Suricata code begins, according to the official timeline.
• 2009: First public beta release occurs on New Year's Eve.
• 2010: OISF is founded and Suricata 1.0 is released.
• 2013: First public in-person Suricata training takes place.
• 2015: First SuriCon is held.
• 2025: Suricata 8.0.0 is released.
• 2026: Official download page lists Suricata 8.0.5 and 7.0.16 as stable releases.

Related projects

• Suricata is commonly compared or deployed alongside IDS/IPS and network-monitoring ecosystems such as Snort-style rules, Emerging Threats/Open rulesets, Zeek-style monitoring, packet capture tooling, SIEM pipelines, and JSON log processors such as jq.

Sources

• https://docs.suricata.io/en/latest/quickstart.html
• https://docs.suricata.io/en/latest/what-is-suricata.html
• https://suricata.io/download/
• https://suricata.io/timeline/
• input source_facts.package-manager