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I ran: brew update in terminal (Mac OS) output: Error: /usr/local must be writable!

Anyway, as you can probably tell I am new to working with this. I searched this expecting it to be a common question but only saw not so helpful answers on github. Any help would be appreciated. *Note my terminal did recently switch to zsh with the last update (not too sure what that is).

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    Usually this is fixed with sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local or sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)/*! Commented Feb 12, 2020 at 21:52
  • @ I copied and pasted the command to install homebrew from their website and it just redownloaded like it wasn't already installed. Now, everything is working. Thanks though @klanomath Commented Feb 12, 2020 at 23:13
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    If that solved your issue, post it as an answer and select it as the solution! It's important to close the loop and definitely not leave things pending in comments! Commented Feb 12, 2020 at 23:38
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    Glad your issue was fixed. In the future, please include all brew output and also the output of “brew doctor”. Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 3:10

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Wound up just reinstalling homebrew with /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" found at https://brew.sh/ . This cleared everything up and I can download packages. Still not sure why brew update didn't do the trick.

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  • The correct answer. Do not try to change the /usr/local access rights. Commented Oct 9, 2021 at 9:25
  • The requested URL returned error: 404 Commented Sep 4, 2023 at 16:11

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