Installing in Homebrew errors

Ibrahim picture Ibrahim · Jan 26, 2011 · Viewed 73.9k times · Source

Attempting to install rvm and ruby 1.9.2

I already installed homebrew and git, but couldn't get complete updates because I kept getting permission errors. Re-installed Snow Leopard and repaired permissions.

Now this happens...

$ brew install wget

Error: Cannot write to /usr/local/Cellar

Answer

Ben Kreeger picture Ben Kreeger · Feb 25, 2011

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