Trouble install node.js with homebrew

mlinegar picture mlinegar · Jul 13, 2015 · Viewed 36.5k times · Source

I'm trying to install Node.js with Homebrew (I installed it previously without using brew, and I've tried deleting all of those files). I've looked at previous questions asking similar things, but I haven't been able to get them to work. First I tried brew link node which gave me:

myusername@c126h060:~$ brew link node
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/node/0.12.6... 
Error: Could not symlink share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp
Target /usr/local/share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp
already exists. You may want to remove it:
  rm '/usr/local/share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp'

To force the link and overwrite all conflicting files:
  brew link --overwrite node

To list all files that would be deleted:
  brew link --overwrite --dry-run node

And then when I run brew link --overwrite node I get the following:

myusername@c126h060:~$ brew link --overwrite node
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/node/0.12.6... 
Error: Could not symlink share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp
/usr/local/share/systemtap/tapset is not writable.

Additionally, when I tried using brew link -n node to find files to manually delete, I managed to delete some of them, but I'm still left with the following files that I can't delete:

myusername@c126h060:~$ brew link -n node
Would link:
/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/npm
/usr/local/bin/node
/usr/local/include/node
/usr/local/share/man/man1/node.1
/usr/local/share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp
/usr/local/lib/dtrace/node.d

When I try to delete I get the following (same thing for all of these files):

myusername@c126h060:~$ rm /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/npm
rm: /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/npm: No such file or directory

What should I do?

Answer

verbranden picture verbranden · Jul 13, 2015

It may be that you don't actually own your systemtap directory. Navigate to /usr/local/share and run this command in order to make yourself the owner:

chown -R <yourusername>:<yourgroupname> systemtap

When I was fixing this same issue earlier today, I had to also go into /usr/local and do the same thing for the lib directory.