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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Not to be the eternally dissatisfied user, but I've never gotten homebrew to work properly on a machine with multiple users. It only works for 1 user at a time, even if it's owned by a user group that both users belong to.

Has anyone else had that problem or found a solution?

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Homebrew maintainer here. I do suffer from the multi-user problem myself, and happily work around it on my own Mac by maintaining a dedicated `brew` user, to which the actual users have passwordless sudo rights.

I’ve taken notes of my workaround, if it helps: https://gist.github.com/claui/ada85e696029cfa8cba9b91723ce2e...

Interesting! Thank you!

Along with Hackbraten's answer — I don't know if this would be more or less work for you but would a per-user Homebrew installation help? I don't have any multi-user machines but for years I've kept my Homebrew installation in ~/Homebrew, where I have complete ownership of it. (Really you can install Homebrew in any directory) Or would the space/compilation cost be prohibitive?

Not a Homebrew maintainer, just a satisfied user.

On macOS, one major drawback is that if you use a non-standard installation directory for Homebrew, you can no longer install binary packages and everything is compiled from source.

If you can live with that, you should be fine though.

Not anymore, right? I've noticed that recently, many formula which don't longer require `/usr/local` specifically actually install from bottles, which has been neat.

That’s correct. A major part of formulae is still not relocatable though.

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