Error: The 'brew link' step did not complete successfully

Question

I run Mac OS X Mavericks. I tried to install node 0.10.25 and the top answer did not work for me.

natevw says to rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm but if the permissions on /usr/local/lib/node_modules look like this:

drwxr-xr-x   3 root      admin   102 Feb  2 20:45 node_modules

then brew will not be able to create its npm symlink in that directory. Here's my solution:

Step 1: Update Homebrew

$ brew update

Step 2: Remove node/npm everywhere on your system

Some of these commands are not necessary depending on how you installed node/npm in the past.

$ brew uninstall npm
$ brew uninstall node
$ npm uninstall npm -g
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules

Note: I had stray node files that I found by running brew -v link node (which gave me the verbose output of the linking errors brew was complaining about). You may need to:

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/include/node
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node

Step 3: Open a new terminal and install node

$ brew install node

The homebrew package for node.js now includes npm again, so this happened to me when I missed the homebrew package's message about removing the standalone version first.

Assuming, like me, you've already broken node/npm by attempting the upgrade before knowing to npm uninstall npm -g first, you can rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm and then brew link node. This removes the standalone self-hosted npm package (rather than the one brew would like to install) and lets brew symlink its bundled one from Cellar.

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local 

would do just fine as mentioned in the brew site troubleshooting

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/wiki/troubleshooting

You probably already installed an older version of node.js using a different method, so you need to manually remove the files that are getting in brew's way.

Do brew link -n node and manually delete those conflicting files and directories, then try brew link node again.

I'm a bit late, what worked for me was this:

* npm uninstall npm -g

* brew uninstall node

* brew install node

* sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/dtrace/node.d

* brew link node (caused error with permissions)

* sudo chmod 777 /usr/local/lib/dtrace/node.d

* brew link node

Everything was successful after this sequence

Try this. Got from another reference and worked for me.

brew uninstall node
brew update
brew upgrade
brew cleanup
brew install node
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local
brew link --overwrite node
brew postinstall node

I had the same problem after transferring all my applications from my old Mac to my new one.

I found the solution by running brew doctor :

Warning: Broken symlinks were found. Remove them with brew prune

After running brew prune, Homebrew is finally back on track :)