Homebrew Permissions mess

Question

I installed Homebrew from my admin account. If I run brew doctor from that account I get no errors, but if I run brew doctor from my non-admin user account, I get warnings about several directories (usr/local and its subdirectories) not being writable, and suggestions that I chown them.

More recently, I installed RVM from my non-admin account (to ensure it was usable to that user and installed in their home directory). I then ran rvm install 1.9.3 (again, as non-admin) and got an error warning me that usr/local/bin isn't writable and is required for Homebrew. Running rvm requirements yields the same warning.

Am I supposed to install RVM as non-admin, switch to admin when I install ruby version with RVM, and then be able to use RVM (for everything other than installing) from the non-admin account? Or is something else wrong here?

The RVM output when I attempted to install 1.9.3 follows:

$ rvm install 1.9.3
Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time.
No binary rubies available for: osx/10.8/x86_64/ruby-1.9.3-p448.
Continuing with compilation. Please read 'rvm help mount' to get more information on binary rubies.
Checking requirements for osx.
ERROR: '/usr/local/bin' is not writable - it is required for Homebrew, try 'brew doctor' to fix it!
Requirements installation failed with status: 1.

It's been suggested to me that I shouldn't have installed Homebrew while logged in as an admin, so I should uninstall (as admin), then reinstall as a regular user. I tried this, but when I run the install script as a regular user, the first thing it tells me is:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
This script requires the user myuser to be an Administrator. If this
sucks for you then you can install Homebrew in your home directory or however
you please; please refer to our homepage. If you still want to use this script
set your user to be an Administrator in System Preferences or `su' to a
non-root user with Administrator privileges.

I imagine this is why I installed it as an admin in the first place. Any help clarifying this?

Answer 1

I had the same problem, I had to read the doc and think a lot.

$ rvm autolibs read-only # read more here: https://rvm.io/rvm/autolibs $ rvm install ruby  # or any version you want 

This tells rvm to install ruby with current installed libs... default is read-fail which terminate rvm for missed requirements.

To use openssl (gem needs it, I had to rebuild ruby). Ask the computer admin install openssl with brew

$ brew install openssl  # if you want to install all dependencies run 'rvm requirements' $ rvm reinstall ruby or  $ rvm install ruby