Fix Homebrew

Before you move forward, you should really make sure that your brew is in good shape.

You can prevent issues with brew install later by making everything right at this moment.

With an incorrect setup you could also run into a situation, when an installation goes fine, but executing a command will fail for some obscure reason (i.e. an incorrect symlink).

Important

Please take your time, and try to fix every warning that brew doctor mentions.

Although these are just warnings, we found that they can cause issues later.

Brew doctor, cleanup

Use these commands to see what is not correct with brew. You might need to fix these "by hand"

brew doctor

You can also let brew to try to fix things:

brew cleanup

Common warnings

This is a non-exhaustive set of warnings from brew doctor output that you should fix before moving on:

Warning: Unbrewed dylibs were found in /usr/local/lib.

Warning: Unbrewed static libraries were found in /usr/local/lib.

Warning: Unbrewed .pc files were found in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig.

Warning: You have unlinked kegs in your Cellar.

Warning: Unbrewed header files were found in /usr/local/include.

Common solutions

These are some commands that you can use to fix these issues. Here cedar-dev is your current username:

sudo chown -R cedar-dev $(brew --prefix)/Homebrew/

sudo chown -R cedar-dev $(brew --prefix)/Cellar/

sudo chown -R cedar-dev $(brew --prefix)/share

sudo chown -R cedar-dev $(brew --prefix)/lib

sudo chown -R cedar-dev $(brew --prefix)/Frameworks/Python.framework

brew link --overwrite python@3.8