I have an aging, but fully functional MacBook. I bought it for syslog-ng testing, but I also use for watching movies. Homebrew no more fully supports old, Intel-based Macs. This blog helps to compile the latest syslog-ng release on these old, but otherwise functional machines.
I have not used my MacBook to compile syslog-ng for a while, just to watch movies. However, version 4.11 of syslog-ng introduced some Mac-related improvements I wanted to test. As someone with a degree in environmental protection, I love to see efficiency improvements (see https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/releases/tag/syslog-ng-4.11.0 for details). So, I wanted to install syslog-ng 4.11 using Homebrew.
No luck. No binary package available, and compilation failed. Checking the Homebrew website I found:
“In September (or later) 2026, Homebrew will not run on macOS Catalina 10.15 and earlier and macOS Intel x86_64 will move to Tier 3, dropping CI support and no additional bottles (binary packages) will be built for macOS Intel.”
My problem was that a dependency did not compile. As I did not want to use MongoDB anyway, I was looking for a way to remove the problematic dependency from the syslog-ng packaging. The following steps in a bash shell helped me to achieve that:
export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1 brew tap --force homebrew/core brew edit syslog-ng brew reinstall --build-from-source syslog-ng
These ensure that you have the latest Homebrew formulae, and that once you edit it, it is not overwritten before you compile the package. In this case I had to disable MongoDB support by removing the client library from the dependencies and adding:
"--disable-mongodb",
to the configure options. With these changes, syslog-ng and its dependencies compile just fine, even on this ancient machine.
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If you have questions or comments related to syslog-ng, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email or even chat with us. For a list of possibilities, check our GitHub page under the “Community” section at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng. On Twitter, I am available as @PCzanik, on Mastodon as @Pczanik@fosstodon.org.