The group also needs permissions for homebrew's local cache of formulae and source files at /Library/Caches/Homebrew: chgrp -R admin /Library/Caches/Homebrew So assign /usr/local to admin group (or your preferred group) and enable group write permissions: chgrp -R admin /usr/local The group needs to administer the local homebrew install directory. Here is a slightly expanded recipe to configure this: You can enable homebrew permissions for more than one user via the admin group, or via any other user group. With multiple people doing installs you could run in to version issues or dependency issues. That lets you customize Homebrew for your environment and control the versions of packages that people are able to install with the brew command. (that user will need to login again to have the privileges granted).įor sanity on the machine, you may want to consider creating your own fork of Homebrew and have your local homebrew git repository point to the local fork. If you need to add a user to the admin group this can be accomplished like this: dseditgroup -o edit -a -t user admin In this case the changes to make are: chgrp -R admin /usr/localĪnd any user from the admin group should be able to manage the homebrew installation on the machine. Make sure anyone from the group admin can write to anything under /usr/local.Make sure everything under /usr/local belongs to the group admin and.Since you already have:Īll users who would need to modify Homebrew are members of admin group. You just need to change some permissions. People don't need to run sudo here to administer homebrew. So you need to open up the permissions on the directory tree for it to be administered by more than one person. Homebrew, by default, sets itself up for single-user access to /usr/local. rw-r-r- 1 ladmin admin 200272 Feb 24 11:48 indexĭrwxr-xr-x 3 ladmin admin 102 Feb 9 15:27 infoĭrwxr-xr-x 4 ladmin admin 136 Feb 9 15:27 logsĭrwxr-xr-x 4 ladmin admin 136 Feb 9 15:27 objectsĭrwxr-xr-x 5 ladmin admin 170 Feb 9 15:27 refs rw-r-r- 1 ladmin admin 73 Feb 9 15:27 descriptionĭrwxr-xr-x 12 ladmin admin 408 Feb 9 15:27 hooks rw-r-r- 1 ladmin admin 218 Feb 9 15:27 config rw-r-r- 1 ladmin admin 41 Feb 9 15:28 ORIG_HEADĭrwxr-xr-x 2 ladmin admin 68 Feb 9 15:27 branches rw-r-r- 1 ladmin admin 23 Feb 24 11:48 HEAD rw-r-r- 1 ladmin admin 94 Feb 24 11:48 FETCH_HEAD So, I could chmod -R g+w /usr/local/ but afraid this will bork something or create security issues?!?ĭrwxr-xr-x 14 ladmin admin 476 Feb 24 11:48. But clearly we do.Īll users who would need to modify Homebrew are members of admin group. Is this considered bad? I thought one of the advantages of using /usr/local/ for your installs was that you don't need sudo. Now a different user would like to add a package and Homebrew isn't happy: $ brew updateįatal: Unable to create '/usr/local/.git/index.lock': Permission deniedĮrror: Failure while executing: git checkout -q master I'm using Homebrew to manage package installs on Lion (Lion Server actually but this shouldn't matter).

Homebrew install copyq