Common Issues

This is a list of commonly encountered problems, known issues, and their solutions.

brew update complains about untracked working tree files

After running brew update, you receive a git error warning about untracked files or local changes that would be overwritten by a checkout or merge, followed by a list of files inside your Homebrew installation.

This is caused by an old bug in in the update code that has long since been fixed. However, the nature of the bug requires that you do the following:

cd $(brew --repository)
git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD

If brew doctor still complains about uncommitted modifications, also run this command:

cd $(brew --repository)/Library
git clean -f

launchctl refuses to load launchd plist files

When trying to load a plist file into launchctl, you receive an error that resembles

Bug: launchctl.c:2325 (23930):13: (dbfd = open(g_job_overrides_db_path, [...]
launch_msg(): Socket is not connected

This is likely due to one of two issues:

1. You are using iTerm. The solution is to use Terminal.app when interacting with launchctl.
2. You are attempting to run launchctl while logged in remotely. You should enable screen sharing on the remote machine and issue the command using Terminal.app running on that machine.

brew upgrade errors out

When running brew upgrade, you see something like this:

$ brew upgrade
Error: undefined method `include?' for nil:NilClass
Please report this bug:
    https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/checklist-before-filing-a-new-issue
/usr/local/Library/Homebrew/formula.rb:393:in `canonical_name'
/usr/local/Library/Homebrew/formula.rb:425:in `factory'
/usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples/brew-upgrade.rb:7
/usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples/brew-upgrade.rb:7:in `map'
/usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples/brew-upgrade.rb:7
/usr/local/bin/brew:46:in `require'
/usr/local/bin/brew:46:in `require?'
/usr/local/bin/brew:79

This happens because an old version of the upgrade command is hanging around for some reason. The fix:

$ cd $(brew --repository)/Library/Contributions/examples
$ git clean -n # if this doesn't list anything that you want to keep, then
$ git clean -f # this will remove untracked files