CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyrvmhomebrew
Plastikfan
Plastikfan

Reputation: 4012

Fixing brew doctor warnings/errors

I have recently installed Homebrew and RVM. However, when I tried to install a new version of Ruby into RVM:...

rvm install 2.2

I got the following error:

Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time.
Found remote file https://rvm_io.global.ssl.fastly.net/binaries/osx/10.9/x86_64/ruby-2.2.0.tar.bz2
Checking requirements for osx.
ERROR: '/usr/local/bin' is not writable - it is required for Homebrew, try 'brew doctor' to fix it!
Requirements installation failed with status: 1.

So I ran the doctor command to view errors and saw:

Please note that these warnings are just used to help the Homebrew maintainers
with debugging if you file an issue. If everything you use Homebrew for is
working fine: please don't worry and just ignore them. Thanks!

Warning: /usr/local/bin isn't writable.

This can happen if you "sudo make install" software that isn't managed by
by Homebrew. If a formula tries to write a file to this directory, the
install will fail during the link step.

I found the same issue with various other directories:

/Library/Caches/Homebrew
/usr/local/Cellar
/usr/local/etc
/usr/local/include
/usr/local/lib
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
/usr/local/opt
/usr/local/share
/usr/local/share/man
/usr/local

When I installed RVM, I did a single user install into a non admin account. This non admin account I will be using as my development account. Is this ok, or should I be developing using an admin account? I am running into all sorts of permissions type issues; eg trying to install a gem, because of write permissions failures and am now questioning what is the proper way to develop code, without being an admin, or should I be an admin?

I was going to start using chown to fix these errors ie

chown $USER -R /usr/local/bin

but, this worries me. Do I want to be changing the owner of all these system directories to my non admin account? Just want some re-assurance really before I go ahead, it just feels, wrong. (PS; is that the correct use of chown?)

I've seen other articles that suggest using sudo, but I've also seen artciles that say you shouldn't use sudo. Err-ing on the side of caution, I would rather not use sudo.

Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3061

Answers (1)

ianml
ianml

Reputation: 782

Most of these questions are pretty well covered by the Homebrew FAQ.

Do I want to be changing the owner of all these system directories to my non admin account?

System libraries are not installed to /usr/local. Apple doesn't include that directory on a clean install. Most likely some other installer put things there as root or another user.

I've seen other articles that suggest using sudo, but I've also seen artciles that say you shouldn't use sudo.

Homebrew should not be used with sudo, but it does assume the user is an admin and has rights to /usr/local. If you are just referring to fixing the permissions with chown, that will require sudo (and admin account).

Upvotes: 1

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