[UPDATE – View updated solution at the bottom of the post.]
So, you wanted to update homebrew with the command
brew update
but received a similar error below:
Error: /usr/local must be writable!
Simple fix is to run
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local
Your problem should now be fixed. If not, you might have ran into this issue that i’ve come across, too:
Error: update-report should not be called directly!
I fixed this by running both these commands
brew upgrade
then
brew update
Ta da! No more errors! Hopefully.
Happy brewing. Cheers, y’all.
UPDATE (2018.03.27):
A commenter pointed out an issue they were having, and after i did some digging, it seems that if you’re running the latest Mac OS High Sierra, you can no longer do the commands i wrote about above. You’ll have to use the tweaked command below:
sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)/*
I found the updated solution here. Thank you to ilovezfs.
There are some other comments below it that may apply to your development environment. Hope this helps!
Cheers and peace.
If you found this post useful ...
Thanks a bunch, macariojames! This helped me out perfectly. :]
I’m glad I could help out! Figured it would be a good thing if I could save others the hour or so of research. Cheers.
hi! while trying to fix this error i’m getting this other error: chown: /usr/local: Operation not permitted . Any other things I can try?
Hey! Sorry for the delay. If you’re still looking for a solution, it seems that chown is no longer allowed in High Sierra (when I wrote this piece originally I wasn’t using High Sierra). So this seems to be the fix:
sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)/*Solution I found here: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/3228#issuecomment-332679274
It’s still not working on Mojave. I have tried everything. And yes I have tried sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew –prefix)/* nothing is working I still can’t make local writable and i cant update brew ……
I sent you an email with some suggestions. Try uninstalling Homebrew, restarting your Mac and then reinstalling Homebrew.
Also make sure macOS is updated. And see if Xcode also is up to date. Hopefully one or all of these things will help.