I am getting issues with permissions in Homebrew: After I installed Node and tried to install npm using the curl command Homebrew tells you to use, it would fail due to EACCESS errors. I checked the node folder and the permissions were a) unowned by a user (I had to chown it) and b) Had no write permissions (I had to chmod 755 it).
I've fixed the issue with NPM, but I had to run its install script as sudo (which is bad!).
I assume I must have installed Homebrew as root or something similar. I am hoping that reinstallation will fix it, but I can't find a source on how to reinstall Homebrew.
When I rerun the installer in Terminal I get:
/usr/local/.git already exists!
The answer is
The way to reinstall Homebrew is completely remove it and start over. The Homebrew FAQ has a link to a shell script to uninstall homebrew.
If the only thing you've installed in /usr/local is homebrew itself, you can just rm -rf /usr/local/* /usr/local/.git to clear it out. But /usr/local/ is the standard Unix directory for all extra binaries, not just Homebrew, so you may have other things installed there. In that case uninstall_homebrew.sh is a better bet. It is careful to only remove homebrew's files and leave the rest alone.
Process is to clean up and then reinstall with the following commands:
rm -rf /usr/local/Cellar /usr/local/.git && brew cleanup
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install )"
Notes:
- Always check
curl | bash (or ruby)commands before running them - http://brew.sh/ (for installation notes)
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install (for clean up notes, see "Homebrew is already installed")
For me, this one worked without the sudo access.
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
For more reference, please follow https://gist.github.com/mxcl/323731
Update 10/11/2020 to reflect the latest brew changes.
Brew already provide a command to uninstall itself (this will remove everything you installed with Homebrew):
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall.sh)"
If you failed to run this command due to permission (like run as second user), run again with sudo
Then you can install again:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
For Mac OS X Mojave and above
To Uninstall Homebrew, run following command:
sudo ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall)"
To Install Homebrew, run following command:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
And if you run into Permission denied issue, try running this command followed by install command again:
sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local/* && sudo chmod -R g+rwx /usr/local/*
Source: Stackoverflow.com