Installing in Homebrew errors
Solution 1:
sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local
You'll have to give yourself ownership of /usr/local/
using that line right there. I had to do this myself after using the ruby one-liner at the top of the official docs to install Homebrew. Worked like a charm for me. It ought to be the only time you'll ever need to sudo
with Homebrew.
I'm not sure if the ruby one-liner does this. If it did, then something else on my system took control of /usr/local
since.
Edit: I completely missed this, but @samvermette didn't (see replies to my answer): if you run this command above and have something installed via homebrew that requires special user permissions, like mysql
, make sure to give those permissions back (as the above command gives recursive ownership to everything inside /usr/local
to you ($USER
). In the case of mysql, it's…
sudo chown -RL mysql:mysql /usr/local/mysql/data
Solution 2:
I had this issue after upgrading to Mavericks, and this page was the top search result when googling the error message. I continued searching and found this answer on stack overflow.com. Put concisely, it is:
sudo chmod a+w /usr/local/Cellar
This fixed the issue for me, and as it only changes permissions for the specific path referenced in the error message, seemed unlikely to have negative side effects with other installations.
I'm putting this answer here for anyone else who may find this page first like I did. However, credit should go to jdi.