How to use Homebrew on a Multi-user MacOS Sierra Setup

macos permissions homebrew multi-user

49,002

Solution 1

(Deleted as of 2020, this answer is outdated)

Solution 2

You can also change the group permissions to admin or another group that both of your users are in:

chgrp -R admin /usr/local
chmod -R g+w /usr/local

Original source: https://gist.github.com/jaibeee/9a4ea6aa9d428bc77925

UPDATE:

In macOS High Sierra you can't change the owner, group or permissions of /usr/local. So you have to change the group and permissions of the subfolders:

chgrp -R admin /usr/local/*
chmod -R g+w /usr/local/*

UPDATE September 2018, High Sierra 10.13.6

Determine the path of the brew prefix, ie. the path that will be used to store files related to working with homebrew
Check that all users on the system who need access to brew are in the admin group
Optional Add a user to the admin group if a user needs access to brew

Will require access / privileges to use the sudo command
Set the brew prefix path to be recursively owned by the admin group
Set the brew prefix path to be recursively writable by all users who are in the admin group
Verify the permissions of the brew prefix
brew 🍻

echo $(brew --prefix)
echo $(groups $(whoami))
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a $(whoami) -t user admin
sudo chgrp -R admin $(brew --prefix) 
sudo chmod -R g+rwX $(brew --prefix)
ls -lah $(brew --prefix)

Solution 3

Every answer that tries to hack permissions, or use sudo is wrong.

Do not use sudo and do not share a single brew installation across user accounts.

The correct answer per the Homebrew docs is to use zero or one global brew installation on a machine, and for all other users install a local version of brew.

This is especially important on Mac, but works on Linux too.

This can be done by one of the following approaches

Git approach: doing a git checkout of the source repo
Untar-anywhere approach: expanding a tarball into some directory – owned by your user

Git approach

For the git approach you'll need to clone brew.

Arbitrarily choosing my user home directory for my checkout:

cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/brew.git
./brew/bin/brew tap homebrew/core

Untar-Anywhere Approach

As documented at docs.brew.sh, run this command in your home directory, which will create ~/brew.

cd $HOME
mkdir brew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C brew

Finishing up

For either installation method, you'll need to change your PATH to prefer the new brew bin directory, adding something like this to your shell's dot file.

export PATH=$HOME/brew/bin:$PATH >> ~/.zshrc # or ~/.bashrc

Then running this to reload and test

exec $SHELL
which brew # see that brew is found in your path

Since this is a new installation, you have to install all your desired brew packages (again).

Solution 4

Install homebrew for each user

According to the brew documentation you can install it inside each User Home folder

That way all packages are going to stay inside your user folder, and will not be visible or affect other users. As a good side effect if you delete that user, no trash is left behind on your system. So system wide pollution is minimised.

This comes at the cost of more storage being used, if you install the same package for multiple users. Just something to be aware if you have a very small SSD.

Instructions

If you currently have brew installed on your system globally, I recommend uninstalling brew first. (You can see where brew is installed running which brew)
If you don't have Command Line Tools installed, you have to run this first:
```
xcode-select --install
```

Open terminal and Run:

MacOS Catalina 10.15 or newer:

cd $HOME
mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/homebrew/bin:$PATH"' >> .zprofile

MacOS Mojave 10.14 or older:

cd $HOME
mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/homebrew/bin:$PATH"' >> .bash_profile

Close the Terminal window
Open Terminal again, and run this to ensure your installation is correct:
```
brew doctor
```
Done!

Disabling auto update

This is not required I also find useful to disable brew to update all packages before every time you install something.

MacOS Catalina 10.15 or newer
echo 'HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1' >> $HOME/.zprofile
MacOS Mojave 10.14 or older
echo 'HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1' >> $HOME/.bash_profile

Solution 5

EDIT: Please use the answer by Vitim, it's the correct one :)

Hacky workaround solution for macOS Mojave 10.14

This is a edited version of user4815162342's answer, which didn't work for me out-of-the-box.

In System Preferences, go to Users & Groups, click the lock symbol in the bottom left corner to unlock user/group creation, then create a new group called brew-usergroup. Add all users who work with brew to the group (like in the attached screenshot from a german macOS).

In terminal, do this:

 echo $(brew --prefix)
 echo $(groups $(whoami))
 sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a $(whoami) -t user brew-usergroup
 sudo chgrp -R brew-usergroup $(brew --prefix)/*
 sudo chmod -R g+rwX $(brew --prefix)/*
 ls -lah $(brew --prefix)

Note that this doesn't change rights of brew folders anymore (like in other answers), it changes subfolders/files of brew folders. brew install should now work fine without errors.

View more solutions

49,002

Author by

Jon Gunter

Updated on July 05, 2022

Comments

Jon Gunter almost 2 years

I have a Mac that is shared between two engineers. Both have separate user accounts. Both need to run brew update and brew install... occasionally.

How do I set this up without getting errors like: /usr/local must be writable!?

Yeah, I could have UserA take over the permissions of /usr/local every time he wants to use brew (and same with UserB), but that seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble.
Wes Modes about 6 years

This seems like a huge security risk. Why not rather, add write permission to users in the admin group?
maniexx over 5 years

This is not actually a solution if you want to use multiple users. You would have to execute that command on each user switch.
maniexx over 5 years

If you are viewing this in the deep future, or on some weird configuration, and the updated solution doesn't work, check if $(brew --prefix) returns /usr/local, and if not - use that value instead.
FooBar over 5 years

I had to add sudo otherwise I would get Operation not permitted error messages
Antonin Décimo over 5 years

The second line should be echo $(groups $(whoami)).
Juan José Ramírez over 5 years

Do not add sudo to avoid Operation not permitted. add /* to the command, ie: sudo chgrp -R admin $(brew --prefix)/*. source
Leonel Galán over 5 years

This solution is sound, however some packages might refuse to work with such permissions. Postgres, for example, throws: FATAL: data directory "/usr/local/var/postgres" has group or world access DETAIL: Permissions should be u=rwx (0700).
n1000 over 5 years

This answer could use some cleaning up... What is the code block at the end? Another update?
jerryb about 5 years

zsh also complains when owner and perms are tweaked like this; compaudit errors every new shell.
Tamas Kalman about 5 years

this looks like as an elegant solution, but unfortunately it's not better than simply doing the same for admin (without creating an extra group). either way, i'm getting these error messages: cp: utimes: /usr/local/Cellar/readline/.: Operation not permitted cp: chmod: /usr/local/Cellar/readline/.: Operation not permitted
Sliq about 5 years

I agree, I think the best would be to push the brew developers to fix this entire issue at the core!
Suragch about 5 years

Alternatively, you could give the group the same privileges that the user has: chmod -R g=u /usr/local/* (as long as you have already set the group to admin).
Suragch about 5 years

That sounds dangerous. What if 'joe' creates a Homebrew package that does bad things?
Sergey Papyan about 5 years

@suragch I guess you can't avoid that danger if you're allowing joe to install any system wide packages not only this way, but in any way.
DrPsychick over 4 years

I just now had the same cp: utimes: /usr/local/Cellar/XXX/.: Operation not permitted error, found that it was caused by a folder with group "staff" instead of "admin", although I ran chgrp -R admin /usr/local/... strange, but fixed :) find /usr/local/ -not -group admin -ls may be of help...
ipatch over 4 years

might want to prepend /bin/chmod for those of us who installed GNU coreutils for macOS
Carlos Pinzón over 4 years

This worked for me, but the repo must be cloned with https in my case. cd $HOME; git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core.git; git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/brew.git
jerryb over 4 years

thanks @CarlosPinzón ! the https URLs instead of the ssh URLs are much easier to use for most. I have updated my answer.
HNipps about 4 years

This didn't work on Mac OS High Sierra. @user4815162342 's answer worked for me.
SebMa over 3 years

@jerryb Hi, ~/brew/bin/brew --version outputs Homebrew 2.5.2-65-gfc6ef72 Homebrew/linuxbrew-core N/A. Shouldn't homebrew-core be installed inside the ~/brew/Library/Taps/homebrew/ directory ?
jerryb over 3 years

@SebMa yes i think you are right and there was a change, I'll update my answer. For "brew --version", my working system which I created recently returns Homebrew 2.5.4\nHomebrew/homebrew-core (git revision 647782; last commit 2020-10-08
SebMa over 3 years

@jerryb Why did you remove the Homebrew/homebrew-core component ? I believe you should this command : git clone https://github.com/homebrew/homebrew-core $HOME/brew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core to you procedure
jerryb over 3 years

@sebma after your feedback which reported issues with the homebrew-core checkout, i could not directly reproduce the problem problem report, but i re-tested my steps with a new home directory on Catalina, excluding the the homebrew-core checkout. Everything seems to work correctly, and brew checked out the homebrew-core itself into the correct location on first operation. I concluded that something changed in the internals so the extra checkout is not required. I am open to the fact that this is incorrect: do you have a reproduce-able set of steps that demonstrates the problem you suspect?
SebMa over 3 years

@jerryb I use Linux. Have you tested it on Linux ?
jerryb over 3 years

@SebMa i'm confused, isn't brew specific to Mac?
SebMa over 3 years

@jerryb It's also compatible with Linux since 2019
jerryb over 3 years

@SebMa I've updated my answer based on your feedback. I did test this on Ubuntu 16 and homebrew-core now appears to be automatically checked out first time running brew.
SebMa over 3 years

@jerryb Here, I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I needed to run a ./brew/bin/brew update (before running ./brew/bin/brew -v) for homebrew to tap the homebrew/core. But actually, it does not work every time. I just removed the ./brew/ directory and re-done the git clone ... and the ./brew/bin/brew update but this time it didn't tap the homebrew/core. I think this step has to be manually after the git clone : ./brew/bin/brew tap homebrew/core. Can you please add the brew tap ... command to your procedure ?
Sliq over 3 years

That is the only answer that actually 1. installs brew only for this current user and 2. correctly sets the PATH so it's useable also after reboot! Thanks Vitim!
jerryb over 3 years

@SebMa done, let me know if I got it right
thenetimp over 3 years

That is a terrible idea.
Clintm over 3 years

from the docs Pick another prefix at your peril!
jerryb about 3 years

I finally found a use case where my solution does not work well: nvm hates to be outside of /usr/local/bin but its been years with this solution with zero trouble otherwise.
Benji about 3 years

As noted on the Homebrew installation documentation: "do yourself a favour and install to /usr/local on macOS Intel, /opt/homebrew on macOS ARM, and /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew on Linux" and goes on to say "Pick another prefix at your peril!" so I'm not sure this method would be advisable.
hdsenevi almost 3 years

I like this answer as it keeps brew local to the user (not shared). But brew doctor returns the following. Is this expected? Warning: Your Homebrew's prefix is not /usr/local. Some of Homebrew's bottles (binary packages) can only be used with the default prefix (/usr/local). You will encounter build failures with some formulae. Please create pull requests instead of asking for help on Homebrew's GitHub, Twitter or any other official channels. You are responsible for resolving any issues you experience while you are running this unsupported configuration.
Tatjana Heuser almost 3 years

While group permissions look like a viable option, there are several details where they will break: Without sticky bits, subdirectories created by brew install runs may result in sub-sub-directories unwritable for the shared group, or the wrong group altogether. Conflicting installtions within Homebrew (they do exist) may break the others installation, and selective versioning may cause dependency lockups. If no curation is available or desired, I'm afraid to each user his own instance might be the ugly answer.
ipatch almost 3 years

as great as this answer is, it does have its limitations. 1. if using a multi user homebrew install isolated within a $HOME dir for particular install, and one wants to use such install with github actions, ie. homebrew's test-bot will be unable to perform actions with the standard setup. this can be seen as a limitation of the actions runner provided by homebrew, but using a vanilla github actions with test-bot brew needs to be installed in /usr/local
zigg over 2 years

I don't see evidence that the person who replied to you is an official maintainer. But this strategy is also similar to a tool I used to maintain: github.com/brewdo/brewdo It worked well for most cases, but I stopped maintaining it some years back due to occasional incompatibilities and the fact that Homebrew itself uses OS sandboxing to stop changes outside the Homebrew installation—an early reason why I started this tool. In any event, based on experience, I think this answer is overly simplistic and may work most of the time, but may be problematic down the road.
zigg over 2 years

This is great! I'm trying it out for a bit. Curious why you may not have included some of the other ACLs, like writesecurity(which appears to be required to, say, make a script executable). I ended up doing chmod -R +a 'group:admin allow readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,wri‌tesecurity,list,sear‌ch,add_file,add_subd‌irectory,delete_chil‌d,read,write,append,‌execute,file_inherit‌,directory_inherit' * against all /usr/local directories after a fresh Homebrew install.
Exploring over 2 years

This would not work in a multi-user environment.
Sliq over 2 years

@jerryb Really good answer, but it mixes up folders, sometimes it's brew and sometimes homebrew, so maybe you can update the answer a bit to remove any confusion ;) Thanks Jerry!
jerryb over 2 years

@Sliq thanks so much for the feedback. You are right and I believe I have edited and fixed the issue you mention.
jerryb over 2 years

I like that you include the xcode step for git, and the brew doctor.
dijonkitchen about 2 years

I need the -i flag as well. Setting an alias helps for regular use: alias brew='sudo -Hiu $HOMEBREW_MAIN_USER brew'
David Scholz almost 2 years

If this answer is outdated, then you should actually delete it and not edit it to indicate that it is outdated.
blackgreen almost 2 years

You can go ahead and delete your answer if you want. It's no longer accepted