Homebrew El Capitan

Oct 06, 2015 Installing Homebrew on Mac OS X prior to El Capitan (that is Yosemite, Mavericks and others) used to be a breeze. But with a new change in OS X El Capitan called SIP - installing Homebrew has become a bit complicated. You need not worry, I have got you covered. Homebrew Logo - Mac OS X. Installing Homebrew on Mac OS X El Capitan used to be a easy. But with a new change in OS X El Capitan called SIP (System Integrity Protection) – installing Homebrew has become a bit complicated. STEP 1: Permission Issues /usr/local/. Note on Homebrew and OS X El Capitan October 21, 2015 on macOS, os x, homebrew, development. Apple released yesterday, September 30th, the new version of OS X called El Capitan. I upgraded today my both machines (iMac and MacBook Pro), and there is one issue with Homebrew, when it is installed on default location on /usr/local. I just upgraded to El Capitan, and when I tried updating brew I got the following error: $ brew update Error: The /usr/local directory is not writable. Even if this directory was writable when you installed Homebrew, other software may change permissions on this directory.

  1. Homebrew El Capitan System
  2. Homebrew Failed El Capitan
  3. Homebrew El Capitan Free

Apple released yesterday, September 30th, the new version of OS X called El Capitan. I upgraded today my both machines (iMac and MacBook Pro), and there is one issue with Homebrew, when it is installed on default location on /usr/local.

HomebrewHomebrew el capitan software

Numark dj io driver download windows 10. This is caused by a change in Apple's security features, called System Integrity Protection, or SIP for short. Basically SIP prevents you from writing to various system locations (e.g. /usr/local), even if you are root.

There is a workaround in Homebrew's docs, but I suggest not to run it as it is said there. This is because there may be some other files for non-Homebrew installed software, like something for F-Secure, and I really don't want to change the ownership of those files and directories.

Instead I did the following:

  1. To see, if I was affected by this issue in the first place, I ran the command brew doctor which basically told, that yes, I was affected.
  2. As a next step, I changed the ownership of the directory /usr/local by running sudo chown $(whoami):admin /usr/local. Note! Not recursively with switch -R.
  3. Then I rerun brew doctor. In case of my elderly iMac, all was clear, and Homebrew was up and running again.
  4. In case of my MacBook Pro, I needed to run the same for directory /usr/local/share/man/man8 with sudo chown $(whoami):admin /usr/local/share/man/man8. After this, brew doctor gave all clear, and I was able to run Homebrew again.

Homebrew El Capitan System

By the way, this is probably necessary to do after every single OS X update in the future, see Apple's dev docs for more.1

Why /usr/local in the first place? Since it is the default location for Homebrew, and I did not know better several years ago. Read more from Hacker News.

Hope this helps, happy brewing!

Homebrew Failed El Capitan

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Homebrew El Capitan Free

  1. Update after the release of 10.11.1 on October 21st 2015: The update process did not change the directory permissions or ownership on /usr/local. Phew.