can't chown /usr/local for homebrew in Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra

Homebrew needs permissions in /usr/local and since no one else uses my laptop I have always simply done

sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)

but in High Sierra, this gives

chown: /usr/local: Operation not permitted

What is the fix?

The problem kept occurring... after digging deeper I found that only uninstalling Homebrew and then re-installing it solved this issue.

Uninstalling will remove all your brew packages, you can save the output of brew list in a file first, to have a record of what packages were installed.

Uninstall Homebrew:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall)"

Then re-install it:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Unfortunately you can no longer chown /usr/local in High Sierra. A workaround is to sudo mkdir /usr/local/include and /usr/local/Frameworks if they don't exist, and

sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)/*

Thanks to ilovezfs for this simple workaround and for the amazing homebrew!

You can not change permission for /usr/local itself , but you can change the right permission for folders underneath , so this fixed the
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/*

I followed https://stackoverflow.com/a/46459153/4502723">this</a> but the problem still persist.
So, I reinstalled homebrew without uninstalling previous one. It's working now!
(I don't know how)

I just run this and everything gets taken care on high sierra:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

I am using MacBook Pro macOS Catalina 10.15.4.

I created a new admin account but the brew was throwing an error.

Hence, I followed a step from this post, what worked is:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)/*

Try disabling System Integrity Protection. From the documentation:

> System Integrity Protection can be configured using the csrutil(1) command.

>You can check whether System Integrity Protection is currently enabled on your system by running the following command in the Terminal:

$ csrutil status
System Integrity Protection status: enabled.

>To enable or disable System Integrity Protection, you must boot to Recovery OS and run the csrutil(1) command from the Terminal.

>Boot to Recovery OS by restarting your machine and holding down the Command and R keys at startup. Launch Terminal from the Utilities menu. Enter the following command: >$ csrutil enable

>After enabling or disabling System Integrity Protection on a machine, a reboot is required.

if you are using zsh because you come from bash you might have to change your $PATH. you should add export PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH in .zshrc

then it should work, this problem resolved in my mac by this way.

I'm also on 10.13 High Sierra. I tried the previous suggestions; nothing worked. Eventually I tried installing the command-line tools first:

xcode-select --install

and then afterwards (re-)ran the brew install command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

and it finally worked.

Make sure you don't have a lock set on the home folder or any folder an install needs access to.

Even if the permissions and ownership are set correctly and you are currently logged in with a correct user/or Root user it will not allow you to make new folders or directories.

I did not have the /user/local/Frameworks folder, so this fixed it for me

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/Frameworks
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/Frameworks

I have OSX High Sierra