new issue

Things to check before filing a new issue

• Did you run brew update?
• Did you check brew doctor?
• Are you running the latest stable version of XCode?
• Do you have X11 installed?
• Have you installed the Java Developer Update?
• Have you completely removed Macports and/or Fink?
• Did you install everything without sudo?
• Did you sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local?

If you promise you’ve done all of the above then you should Gist your brew install -v $FORMULA output, your brew doctor output and then file an issue with all of this information.

If we find out you didn’t actually do all the above because you thought you knew better or you really like sudo then you give us permission to tell your mother that you are a mean person.

You can read about each of these points in more detail below:

Up to date?

We might have already fixed the problem. Please run brew update again.

`brew doctor`

Run the brew doctor command to do a sanity check on your configuration.

Xcode version

Newer beta and older stable versions of Xcode have issues with many formulas. Make sure you are running Apple’s latest stable release for your version of OSX.

X11

We need X11 installed for a lot of formulas for the libraries it provides (e.g. libpng). If you don’t have it installed, please do so from your OSX disc.

Java Developer Update

Apple’s changed it’s Java packages to no longer install all necessary headers. Please install the Java Developer Update from Apple. If you see an error referencing “jni.h” this is probably because you haven’t done this yet.

Uninstall MacPorts and Fink

Building C/C++ is ridiculously complicated, any number of things can go wrong and it’s pretty common to get conflicts between different versions of the same library. Or for a build tool to use the wrong version of a library. For example, CouchDB will look in the MacPorts directory even if it isn’t in the path, and this will break the brew installation.

Homebrew may still work, just be aware of the risks.

Clear out /usr/local of stuff you installed without a package manager before installing Homebrew

brew list --unbrewed | egrep '^(lib|include)'

If anything shows up, you should consider deleting these files especially if they are common libraries like libexpat.

Installing Homebrew in a FileVault-enabled $HOME may cause problems with permissions

If Homebrew is installed in a user directory and FileVault is enabled for this user, these formulas are reported to have some issues:

• htop (need to be run as sudo to see all processes)
• mysql (if ran in a screen, must be restarted after logout/login)

Using sudo and fixing permissions

Running Homebrew or installed programs as sudo may cause permission problems, please try reinstalling and packages that seem to be mentioned without using sudo.

Regardless, you might have still broken your permissions somehow. Fix them by running sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local.