[alex1]

I'm curious to know if there's a reason everyone installs Homebrew in /usr/local (other than it being the default installation path). I've always chosen to install it in ~/.homebrew and haven't had any problems. Everything I install with Homebrew seems to handle an alternative prefix without issue.

[skrause]

brew supports pre-compiled binary packages (what they call bottles) only when you use the default install location /usr/local. If you use any other prefix brew will always compile all packages on your system, which might take a long time depending on the performance of your system. So using /usr/local saves time and energy since all brew needs to do is to download and install binary packages.

[__david__]

Actually, many bottles are marked as safe to install anywhere, so even if you don't use /usr/local you will still get a lot of things installed via bottles (but not everything).

[eloisant]

That's a common Unix practice to put system-wide stuff manually managed (as opposed to managed by the OS/distribution) in /usr/local.

[alex1]

Yep, I agree and that's where I install stuff on everything other than OS X. One distinction though, I think, is that most of the stuff I install on OS X I don't want to be available system-wide. I'm (typically) not using Homebrew to install daemons that run all the time or things that serve critical system/network functions, so I've never seen a reason to make them available to the entire system. I agree that goes against the Unix way but I started preferring this way of using Homebrew after I had similar problems upgrading and even updating OS X.

Also, what if for some reason a single machine is shared by two people and they need different versions of some programs installed with Homebrew? Installing everything in /usr/local isn't going to look like a good idea then.

[Camillo]

It's not going to look like a good idea even if they need the same version. You're not supposed to run homebrew as root; it runs as your own user instead. If two users try to install things with homebrew in the same directory, you're going to end up with some things owned by one user and some things owned by the other, and things will start failing pretty soon.

A while ago I floated the idea of having a separate, low-privilege "brew" user that installs things, with the brew command automatically switching to that user, but there was no interest.

[justincormack]

Homebrew is not really "manually managed" though - I prefer just things I actually manually install in /usr/local

[eyko]

It is if by manually managed we mean _not managed by the system/OS, and not updated without user interaction_. If you update OSX and you had homebrew binaries in /usr/bin, they'd be gone. Homebrew also won't you that there are updates and never updates packages unless you decide to get a new version.

[snotrockets]

But not to 775 it and change it's owner from root:root (both of which Homebrew does)

[favadi]

For me, because it is the default, and there is section in homebrew FAQ tell that many build scripts breaks if it isn't in `/usr/local/`.

[tvon]

Homebrew is great, but using /usr/local as the default install location just a bad idea.

[dingaling]

> in ~/.homebrew

Not sure about OS X but common corporate Unix protocol is to make /home/ noexec.

Non-core ( i.e. outside central package management ) installations go to /opt/

[Tehnix]

Because it has never caused any trouble having it in /usr/local, and as another user said /usr/local/bin is part of the standard path.

Other than this one-liner, which is done once, there really isn't any extra hassle with using the default.

I'd be more interested in why you didn't want to install it there?

[__david__]

I installed mine in /usr/local/brew because I already had a ton of stuff in /usr/local managed with GNU stow before brew even existed. I don't have any problems with it.

Someone I know puts it in ~/brew and that works just fine, too. His reasoning is that /usr/local/ is for all users, and though he's really the only user on his laptop, it's just wrong to install a bunch of stuff that's just for him into a global user directory.

[alex1]

Mostly because of my (perhaps irrational) OCD in not wanting to touch global system paths or files, even though under FHS /usr/local is where you're supposed to install manually-managed libraries and binaries. I believe Homebrew likes to have its path owned by you instead of root, so I think it makes more sense to have stuff that's going to be owned by me to be in my home folder rather than /usr/local.

[rbinv]

Actually it sounds like you will need to run this/restore permissions after every future OS X update.

[_jsn]

Right. The OS X image now has to contain a /usr/local directory so that it exists unrestricted after you install the OS (otherwise you would be unable to create it yourself, because /usr is restricted). It has to ship with some permissions, so it rightly ships owned by root. The installer will apply these permissions each time it runs.

Aside: I really wish Homebrew didn't encourage having a single user own /usr/local. If they're going to insist on never needing sudo to install things, it should just default to installing in your home directory.

[Tehnix]

Hmm, having been on El Capitan since the first beta, this hasn't happened. Do you have anywhere it states that?

[rbinv]

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/h...

"Apple documentation hints that /usr/local will be returned to root:wheel restricted permissions on every OS X update; Homebrew will be adding a brew doctor check to warn you when this happens in the near future."

[crazysim]

Perhaps they should consider adding an option to install something into launchd that just does this.