Why can't brew find a specific known formula?

Question

I'm trying to install bazel on my mac (10.11.5).

I can see that it is available through brew: http://braumeister.org/formula/bazel

But when I run "brew install bazel", I get this:

Error: No available formula for bazel 
Searching formulae...
Searching taps...

Why is this?

Answer 1

In my case, Homebrew was already up-to-date after running brew update and I still received the same error messages as the OP when trying to install xdebug:

$ brew update
Already up-to-date.
$ brew install php70-xdebug
Error: No available formula with the name "php70-xdebug"

Using Mark's suggestion from the comments on OP solved the problem:

$ brew search xdebug
homebrew/php/xdebug-osx    homebrew/php/php70-xdebug

So now, running $ brew install homebrew/php/php70-xdebug, Homebrew found and installed the package.

Answer 2

You should update your brews, because it is indeed available. Run

brew update
brew install bazel

and then it should work.