How to install subversion using homebrew on OSX

Question

i tried

$ brew install subversion

and see

Error: Cannot write to /usr/local/Cellar

Am I missing anything?

Answer 1

Check the permissions on /usr/local/Cellar/.

Answer 2

Your /usr/local/Cellar/ is not writable to brew. Check permissions on that folder.

ls -lA /usr/local/ | grep Cellar

# dr-xr-xr-x   18 *****  admin    612 Feb 18 08:47 Cellar
#   ^  ^  ^

In this case it needs write permissions:

chmod u+rw /usr/local/Cellar/

It's also possible the folder is owned by root.

ls -lA /usr/local/ | grep Cellar

# drwxr-xr-x   18 root  root    612 Feb 18 08:47 Cellar
#                 ^^^^  ^^^^

In this case you need to change the owner:

chown $(whoami):admin /usr/local/Cellar/

And you may have to do both the chown and chmod commands.

This is typically caused by running brew with sudo (sudo brew install subversion). You generally don't want to do this. brew should ask for your password if it needs to sudo and this will give folders and files the correct permissions.